The practice of setting the mood is something we do all the time. The deep breath you take in the kitchen when your morning coffee is brewing. When you light your favorite candle on your desk before sitting down to work. The time you take to create the perfect playlist for your dinner party. It’s in the details that the overall mood of an event comes together and defining the mood is one of the first things you do with your couples in the wedding planning process.
Your mood boards play an important role in the planning process. Creating it is your couple’s first experience collaborating with you. It’s where you start to make the couple’s vision come to life while showcasing your signature. It’s an opportunity to illustrate the value of your wedding planning services. So creating a mood board is much more than creating one for the wedding – it’s about setting the tone for your couple’s entire planning experience.
So as you sit down to create a mood board for either the first or 500th time, take a few minutes to think about your design process and how you go about setting the mood.
1. Investigate
Since the overall goal of creating an inspiration board is to define the general palette and feel of a wedding, don’t worry about exact details at in this stage of the design process. Your first goal is to really understand the aesthetic of your couple — the look and feel they are envisioning as well as what makes them tick. We asked Aisle Planner’s Founder, Christina Farrow, about how she started the exploratory process and here are some of the questions she would go through with her couples.
What words would you use to describe your wedding?
What do you see your wedding feeling like? (house party, garden party, dinner party gala)
What colors are you drawn to?
What colors do you turn you off?
What are your favorite flowers?
What is your favorite season?
Where do you shop?
What does your wardrobe look like?
Do you want your wedding to be an extension of your personal style or something that is out of the box?
Taking the time to dig deep and investigate what story your couple is wanting to tell on their big day is foundational to creating a really effective design roadmap and that’s what your mood board is. So investing your time into learning who your couple is as individuals as well as a pair, will help you turn abstract ideas into tangible ones.
2. Ideate
After you have basically made yourself part of your couple’s family, it’s time to start collecting images. Capturing the visual inspiration that the couple has worked so hard to collect (read: created 100 different Pinterest boards) is no small feat. Some couples have been dreaming about their wedding day for much longer than they have been engaged and can plop a huge amount of inspiration on your desk. Your job? To sift through it all and find what is still relevant to their love story. How do you do that? Editing all of that inspiration down to what truly captures the mood in one cohesive look.
Sounds super abstract, right? And it is; especially because everyone’s design process is so different. Some planners are very calculated in their approach while others are very organic. Some planner only pull images that are wedding-centric while other pull inspiration from different design fields. But, regardless of how you collect ideas and start to organize them, one thing is true across the board — that you are translating the story from words to the images that will inform the rest of the planning process.
3. Inspire
Once you narrowed down your visual inspiration to the images that embody the emotions that your couple wants to experience on their wedding day, the last step of developing a mood board is to create your layout. And whether you are super technologically savvy and building your boards from scratch in Photoshop or Illustrator, doing it old school with prints or using a collage tool, what you are working to build is something that captures the personality of the wedding in one powerful presentation.
Doing this effectively is a process of balancing the color, light, and texture of your images in a way that showcases the main focal points without relegating the supporting actors to the background. Your couple’s hire you to make the decision making process easy in the midst of a very emotional and stressful time. So take the time to create a thoughtful mood board that makes your couple really excited about what is to come.
"Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye." — Dorothy Parker
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