How To Create a Style Mood Board: Manifest Your Style in 2023
February 22, 2023The start of the new year is when people stop and reflect upon their life. They think about their mistakes and triumphs over the past year, and they try to come up with ways to make the upcoming year better. One way to improve yourself in the new year is to establish your personal style. A style mood board is a tool that helps guide and develop your style in purchasing garments, cute purses, and how you wear your outfits.
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What Is a Style Mood Board?
Designers use a tool called a mood board to organize their inspirations and ideas about a particular project. A mood board is a physical or digital collection of images, text, and materials. These items are carefully selected and arranged on the board to generate a cohesive, organized representation of the project’s goal. Designers use mood boards to create the style that will be the basis of specific brands, products, websites, and video channels.
The preliminary mood board is shared with the client or supervisor, and after some back-and-forth, the final mood board is approved. The designer then constantly refers to the mood board throughout the process of developing the final product to ensure it remains true to the style.
Mood boards are affordable and easier to produce than prototypes or mock-ups. They are good tools for a client and a designer to use to make sure they are on the same page when it comes to the desired style of the final product. The client may not understand the terms a designer uses to describe styles, but the client can look at a mood board and immediately grasp what the designer is trying to say.
When preparing a style mood board for yourself, you are both the designer and the client. The same principles apply, though. The mood board allows you to clarify in your mind what you want your personal style to look like in 2023. Once you have finalized your mood board, look at it carefully before purchasing any new clothing or accessories to make sure they suit your personal style. You can also look at it while selecting your outfit for each event you attend to ensure your style remains true.
How To Make a Style Mood Board?
You’ll want to invest in a large corkboard to hold your style mood board materials. Mount it in your closet or dressing room, near your wardrobe, so you can refer to it when selecting outfits.
Next, gather your materials:
- Magazines
- Scissors
- Pushpins, glue, and tape
- Fabric swatches
- Paint color swatches
- Color printer
What Kinds of Magazines?
Your magazines should be diverse. Your personal style may be reflected in a particular tree, an animal, a cartoon character, or even an astronomical picture from the James Webb telescope. Be creative and open-minded. Don’t just collect pictures of clothing. You should, however, collect a lot of pictures of clothing at this stage to help you identify themes, even if none of the pictures of clothing end up on your final style mood board.
Use your color printer to create hard copies of digital images that catch your eye. Visit the hardware store to collect paint swatches in colors that you like. Go to the fabric store and pick out types of fabrics that you like to look at and touch.
Use your scissors to cut out images from your magazines and other hard copies. Spend some time looking at and sorting through your images and samples. Always remember to be realistic when deciding which clothing images to keep.
Why Do You Like the Images and Samples?
As you go through your images and samples, try to clarify in your mind why each image caught your attention. Why did you select that piece of cute jewelry? Is it the color combination or the shape of the lines? As you perform this exercise for each image, you should start to notice you selected multiple images for the same reason. This is a style theme. Write it down as soon as you recognize it. You should be able to generate several style themes.
Create Your Board
Once you have your style themes, ruthlessly toss out any images and samples that don’t fit in with your personal style. Take the remaining items and arrange them on your corkboard. Take your time with this step. Arrange and rearrange the items until you are completely satisfied that your mood board does reflect your personal style.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, a style mood board can help you in many ways. It can allow you to develop your own personal style, provide deep insights into why you like and dislike things, and assist you in remaining true to your style. Style mood boards not only provide guidance when purchasing new garments and accessories but also help you look your best when you assemble an outfit.
The process of developing a style mood board can take quite a bit of time, but once you have a board that you like, you will find it invaluable. Some people make several boards, such as one for formal outfits and one for casual outfits, or one for each season. That’s entirely up to you!