In a Bored Mood? Make a Moodboard!

The world we’ve made for ourselves prominently features a virtually endless black hole called The Internet.  You know that, you’re on it right now. Basically everything that has ever or will ever be created is probably somewhere in the World Wide Web. 

Want to know what the top trending Gods are? Sure! Feel like running an Olympic race as a guy with no muscle control? Well now you can! 

Anyways, you get it.

Did I lose you there? I’m going off track here to make a point (and to LOL at QWOP); thanks to the omnipresent Internet, sometimes it can be hard to get focused. Millennials are often criticized about our inability to focus. Apparently we can’t put down our phones when we’re intoxicated, driving or even riding a motorcycle.  We tend to want to do everything at once all the time, and instead end up doing a medium-ly okay job at everything.

So, to focus back in here; we need more focus. Yes, we all know this.

My new favorite thing to do with my spare time is to make boards on Pinterest.  It’s basically Tumblr on crack where you can find everything you like times a thousand, but you’re pretty much S.O.L there if you’re a dude as 80% of Pinners are ladies. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve spent entire days on that site, meticulously scanning the endless resource of beautiful images until I find a few that are worthy and inspiring enough to be pinned onto my own personal boards.

Pinterest is the perfect site for curating your own moodboards. A moodboard is something that used to be made with pictures from magazines, but in this era of The Internet JPEGs have replaced glossies and computer mice (mouses?) are the new scissors.

Okay, you get the point. LOL

Before embarking on a creative project, it’s good to have an idea of what inspires you. Think of your project, plan it out thoroughly, then get to Pinning, Tumbling, copy pasting, or straight up snipping to try and focus all of your ideas into one contained space. That way, if you feel yourself going off track you can always refer back to the moodboard. 
Hopefully it’ll get you... in the mood.

Recently I was tasked to making an Integrated Marketing Campaign for a local boutique from scratch, and before we started conceptualizing we visited the store and then made a moodboard the old-fashioned way, the good ol' hands-on copy & paste.

Me and my girl Emily with our sweet board. Note the usage of foamcore.

I found myself referring back to it, and took elements that I liked from this mishmash of swans and Ricky Gervais to make most of my creative decisions about the campaign. At Think Shift, account people and creatives work together to come up with Moodboards before every new project to visually map out a rough idea of what the final result will look like

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Sites like Polyvore and tavi gevanson’s blog can help you get in the mood for boarding, and FFFFOUND!  and Baubauhaus. are great sources for the more graphically designed-inclined, among about a billion other available websites.

So the next time you feel like embarking on a big project, consult Pinterest, then watch the hours of the day fly by. 

Oh and if you’re clipping your moodboard out from magazines, always remember that everything looks better on foamcore.

Everything.