How To Create a Mood Board for Your Home and Renovations

Do you feel like you are on this winding journey of turning your house into a home? It can be so easy to get overwhelmed by the vast amount of design types that are out there, difficult to find your own aesthetic and sometimes even harder to just pick the right colour palette. This is where the importance and value of making a mood board comes in. We get it. We understand that the word “mood board” makes it sound like you have to be a design influencer, but we promise you that they are a game changer and everyone should be doing them.

What Exactly is a Mood Board?

To put it in the simplest of terms, a mood board is an arrangement of images, materials, text, etc. intended to project a particular style or concept. They can be used for home renovations as well as home design and believe it or not, they’re very easy - and fun - to make!

Why Would You Use a Mood Board?

The whole purpose of creating a mood board is to help you visualize your thoughts/ideas to paper. They will help you to align the aesthetic, colour palette and tone of the project that you are doing. Not only that, but a mood board can actually help you to avoid making mistakes and in turn, save you some money.

So How Do You Make One?

First things first, let’s decide if you’re wanting to make a physical mood board or a digital one. A physical mood board can be nice to have because you can physically hold it and touch the textures. We do, however, suggest a digital mood board as they are the easiest to make and you can change things around, remove or switch items up. So let’s make a digital one.

Step 1

Find and save any design elements you’d like to use on your mood board. Go to all those online stores you love - ours included- and start fantasy shopping. Be sure to utilize everything you can find on the online world. This includes all online retail stores, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. It is best to try and find images that have a white background, but if you can’t that’s okay to as you can always crop the image as much as possible.

Step 2

Now let’s remove all the backgrounds from the images. This step is optional, but it does help you to create a more cohesive mood board/look in the end. You can use paid apps like CANVA Pro and Clipping Magic to remove the backgrounds for you, or you can use a free online website like Remove.bg. Be sure that when you are saving your images that you save them as a PNG file, not a JPEG. A PNG file allows you to save the transparent background instead of the background being white.

Step 3

Upload your images onto a platform like CANVA (you can use the free version for this part). We prefer having a lot of space to play around, so we make the canvas size around 8.5 x 11 inches (that’s 806 x 1056 in pixels).

Step 4

Now it’s time for the fun part. Move the images around to see how you like them and how they play and work together. You can use the POSITION button on the upper right side to move images in front or behind others. Add the bigger items first and then move your smaller items in after.

As you’re doing this, don’t forget to add a few important elements! All mood boards should
include:

1. Texture
2. Design inspiration
3. Lifestyle images
4. Colour palette

The best part about all of this, is that you get to have fun. This will help you find your aesthetic, see what you will truly love in your home and help to ease some of the renovation and design stress.

Have fun and happy mood boarding!