At the beginning of her design career, when Robyn Kanner was working at an advertising agency, she wasn’t a fan of making so-called mood boards — aka pinboards of images that marketers and designers use when conceiving of a new campaign.
Kanner, 35, a creative director who has done design work for President Joe Biden, the Democratic National Committee and Gov Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, recalled how engaging in the process of swiping existing imagery didn’t really help her create ideas. So when she rose through the ranks, she decided to try a different approach.
In fact, Kanner has forsaken the term “mood board” altogether. Instead, she makes “worlds.” And she’s pretty happy with the results. “A mood board is an idea. A world is a place that triggers all my senses,” she said. “How does a place smell? What sounds do I hear? What does it feel like when I touch it? A world is alive, versus a mood board, which is something that lives on a corkscrew board.”
Now, whenever Kanner takes on a new client, she first looks for a shared language.
“On Josh Shapiro’s campaign, it was sports,” she said.
“The governor really understood sports, and it was really authentic to his core. I grew up watching basketball, so I knew how to talk about basketball with him. We made a basketball jersey for his campaign and built a basketball court for his inaugural ball.”
Mood boards have been a common brainstorming tool in fashion and advertising since at least the 1980s. In a 1985 Chicago Tribune article, interior designer Raymond Waites explained his creative process: “I work in my head, then do thumbnail sketches that not another human being in the world can decipher. Then I do a ‘mood board.’ I’ll use fabric swatches, pull pictures of a chair out of publications, pictures out of people’s homes.”
In recent decades, making mood boards or “vision boards” has also become popular among young women, who cut and paste rousing images of the lives they want out of magazines and other sources.
“I use Pinterest for my mood boards,” said Yun Gao, a 21-year-old Cooper Union student. “I go on the platform all the time to look at visual inspiration.”
Among professionals, however, mood boards have become passé, a relic of a previous era where branding was defined much more narrowly.
“Twenty years ago, a brand was really just an icon and colours,” said Borzou Azabdaftari, 43, the founder and CEO of NickelBronx, a digital agency that focuses on branding.
“As the word ‘brand’ has evolved to include everything from the tone of your content to the kind of music you play at your store or restaurant to the kind of art you have up, creating a more comprehensive brand world has become much more important. They become living, breathing documents that can change and evolve.”
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