• By admin
• no comments

Top Moodboarding tactics that web designers need to implement in the year 2016

This is the web designer’s platter of bread and butter. Sometimes, you might fall short of words or most of the times it is not necessary that people realize what you are trying to communicate. Web designing is like a game of gambling when you are trying to express or communicate a chain of feelings or mood or anything and everything.

You might have put in a lot of effort and created an aesthetic design for your client and imagine the plight and pain when they reject it. No, you don’t want your efforts to go unappreciated when you are an expert at designing. Saying this, I would like to point out one of the most important and basic rules of website development, which is involving the client at each phase of the project development process.

This kind of an approach has always helped web designers and developers to create products that meet the client’s expectations and their business requirements. And this is when we arrive at moodboards and perceive their prominence in web designing. The effort involved in creating website designs that are appealing and catch the visitor’s eye is way too far from what you can visualize or imagine.

While you are moving across your expedition to research design components and include these in your project you can utilize moodboards to maintain a sketch of what are all the things that you wish to incorporate in your design and you can review the same frequently to ensure that you are not deviating from the original path of execution.

Now, if you are hearing the word moodboard for the first time, let me tell you this it is not an asset of the IT industry as it was already here long before the first web designer started his career in web designing. It is commonly used in interior designing and fashion designing and now the web and graphic designers are weaving their stories across these.  Moodboards are a great tool that helps to translate your perseverance of the client’s story in visuals.

My definition of a moodboard is quite simple- the moodboards or design boards are either a virtual or real representation of your ideas before implementing these. It can be anything and everything including photographs, color palettes, textures, designs and even words that might describe your business objectives.

Here is Wikipedia’s definition for a moodboard: “A type of collage that may consist of images, text, and samples of objects in a composition of the choice of the mood board creator. Designers and others use mood boards to develop their design concepts and to communicate to other members of the design team.”

Why designers mood board every time?

Let me ponder my thoughts on this topic with a warning to those designers who do not moodboard that if you have never tried this out, the next time you work on a project do not skip this part. Also, I bet if you are not yet moodboarding then the number of reworks you might have done must be limitless. Why waste your time and budget resources unnecessarily when you can get it done with ease?

At what point of a design process do moodboards emerge?

Exactly, it fits in the web design process somewhere in between design mockups and wireframes. What is more interesting about a moodboard is that it is deliberately a comfortable tool that allows designers to make a rough sketch of their project and you can easily take this to your clients to get their suggestions and feedback before it is too late and you end up investing too much time and money unnecessarily.

Now let me unveil how moodboarding helps both the designers and the clients:

Designers: Imagine that you have undertaken a project and you are starting to work on it but where do you start when you have the least idea of what you are going to do. Are you just going to sit and stare at the blank screen? The client’s role is to put forward their requirements while some people might be a step ahead when it comes to providing a brief sketch of what they are expecting while others deliberately do not provide the further details or are least aware of their requirements. So, why not contemplate on generating some ideas and transform these into broad strokes on a moodboard.

This will save you a lot of time and effort as you can take it to your clients and confirm whether this is what they are expecting. The plight of a project design that gets rejected once you have been dedicatedly working through it for a long time is something that no designer can bear.

Happy & satisfied clients: “Involve your client at each phase of the project development cycle”, we have been hearing this for quite some time now. This is a true fact that actually works as it helps to generate great results that fulfill the client expectations. When you moodboard inspiration and present it to your client, they have an idea of what the final product will look like. They can also provide suggestions and feedback that will further help you in your efforts to create a great design. Also, as we have already discussed there is no unnecessary wastage of time and resources when clients disapprove of the design at a later time because you kept them in the dark while you worked on the project.

Dear designer, do not forget that words can complicate things. If you think that you can convince your clients about the design through verbal communication, I’m sorry to say but my dear friend you have got it wrong. It will spoil your efforts because expressing through words is differently interpreted when compared to the moodboard visuals that actually conveys the design you have in your mind.

This makes us clear on why Moodboarding is an essential necessity of any design process.

Now let me take you across how to create a Moodboard and the essential elements to consider while working on it:

A Moodboard gives the client an idea of what are the components that will come across in the actual design. So, It will be worth the time and efforts that you will allocate to Moodboarding. Here is a list of entities that needs to be present on your Moodboard (this is a normal list though you can choose to add much more as per the availability of time and other resources and also depends on your client’s attitude towards a problem).

First let me start with the list of things that cannot be represented using a Moodboard:

Page template designs ( including Home Page, About Us, and even Services). Try moodboarding template designs and you’ll realize how skeptic moodboards are with these.

Content in the body, title, headlines and the one that appears on the image selection.

User interaction and the final components or appearance of your site.

Don’t confuse Moodboarding with prototyping or wireframes.

These are the things that come to my mind when I think of Moodboarding:

Layout:

• Colors
• Font styles
• Photography
• Navigation style
• Spacing
• iconography if necessary
• textures