How To Create a Mood Board

A mood board is a visual tool to help convey your design concepts and inspirations. A curated collection of images, samples, and materials in different colours, textures and finishes to help achieve a specific style or ambience for a project.

See what an industry expert has to say in helping you create a mood board for your next project…

Set up in 2016 by founder Athina Bluff, Topology is an all-female-led design studio based in London that was created with a mission to provide stylish interiors that have an emphasis on affordability. Athina, having worked in the luxury furniture industry where designs were extremely costly & unattainable for the everyday person, felt as though there was a gap in the market to create a trend-focused & modern interior design service that was attainable, accessible and achievable for the mass market. It was here that Topology was born and their friendly team now offer design services from just £299 per room (to anyone in the UK) with their ‘e-design’ packages. Think tricky layouts tackled, access to trade prices, builder recommendations, product sourcing provided, colour schemes debunked & more.

Head to Topology Interiors for more information.

When refreshing your home it can be a process filled with decision overwhelm; from being saturated by ideas on Instagram to Pinterest and interior magazines, it’s hard to know where to start and what direction to go. So we always recommend starting a mood board and sitting down for about an hour to do this. It is therapeutic and helps you pin down ideas, fabrics, textures, and concepts you like onto paper, which can help solidify ideas and properly plan your room out.

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Step 1

Start by collating as many ideas as possible into a digital space. This could be anything and everything from pictures of furniture items you like, to general inspiration pictures, to supplier details, and fabric/paint ideas. This could be in note form such as a Google doc or a platform like Notion, but the purpose of this is so that you can start to see some overarching themes and ideas forming that are cohesive. For example, if you don’t yet know your style, it might help you pin down your vision into a more coherent look and feel.

Step 2

From here try to sit with these ideas for a week and then come back to it and make a start on a digital mood board on something like Canva. During this phase, you should be able to now whittle away any bits you’ve collated that perhaps are no longer relevant, or are no longer to your liking, so the result is that you end up with a smaller collection of ideas on file.

Step 3

Next up order all the samples you need to start making a physical mood board - we find that cutting up interior magazines too adds a nice addition. Doing a tangible mood board so you can see all the samples in their textural form helps bring a scheme to life. So, get a large piece of card and start to play around with them - don’t stick things down at the start, play around with different combinations and use a pen to annotate with notes and ideas. Allocate around an hour, to an hour and a half for this process and you should find it extremely therapeutic!

Order up to 8 free samples here.

This scheme is centred around earthy muted tones that we’re seeing in trends at the moment with a subtle pattern clashing for an eclectic feel. We’ve also used rich woods and brass accents for an understated luxury feel.

This scheme is calming, feminine and Scandi in tone with the light wood and travertine. Light schemes always work wonderfully with darker pops so we’ve included a dark green velvet for upholstery to add some oomph into the space.

Don’t rush the process! Take your time if you can and nurture it over a couple of weeks. We often find that we often get rid of initial ideas we like after we’ve had time to reflect and sit on them a bit. If you put down ideas at the start that you keep throughout the whole process you know they’ll be ideas you’ll be confident to implement and that will have longevity.