At the beginning of her design career, when Robyn Kanner was
working at an advertising agency, she was not a fan of making so-called mood
boards — aka pinboards of images that marketers and designers use when
conceiving of a new campaign.
اضافة اعلان
Kanner, 35, a creative director who has done design work for
President Joe Biden, the Democratic National Committee and Gov. Josh Shapiro of
Pennsylvania, recalled how engaging in the process of swiping existing imagery
did not really help her create ideas. So when she rose through the ranks, she
decided to try a different approach.
In fact, Kanner has forsaken the term “mood board” altogether.
Instead, she makes “worlds”. And she is pretty happy with the results. “A mood
board is an idea. A world is a place that triggers all my senses,” she said.
“How does a place smell? What sounds do I hear? What does it feel like when I
touch it? A world is alive, versus a mood board, which is something that lives
on a corkscrew board.”
Now, whenever Kanner takes on a new client, she first looks for
a shared language. “On Josh Shapiro’s campaign, it was sports,” she said. “The
governor really understood sports, and it was really authentic to his core. I
grew up watching basketball, so I knew how to talk about basketball with him.
We made a basketball jersey for his campaign and built a basketball court for
his inaugural ball.”
Mood boards have been a common brainstorming tool in fashion and
advertising since at least the 1980s. In a 1985 Chicago Tribune article,
interior designer Raymond Waites explained his creative process: “I work in my
head, then do thumbnail sketches that not another human being in the world can
decipher. Then I do a ‘mood board.’ I’ll use fabric swatches, pull pictures of
a chair out of publications, pictures out of people’s homes.”
In recent decades, making mood boards or “vision boards” has
also become popular among young women, who cut and paste rousing images of the
lives they want out of magazines and other sources. “I use Pinterest for my
mood boards,” said Yun Gao, a 21-year-old Cooper Union student. “I go on the
platform all the time to look at visual inspiration.”
Among professionals, however, mood boards have become passé, a
relic of a previous era where branding was defined much more narrowly. “Twenty
years ago, a brand was really just an icon and colors,” said Borzou
Azabdaftari, 43, the founder and CEO of NickelBronx, a digital agency that
focuses on branding. “As the word ‘brand’ has evolved to include everything
from the tone of your content to the kind of music you play at your store or
restaurant to the kind of art you have up, creating a more comprehensive brand
world has become much more important. They become living, breathing documents
that can change and evolve.”
Aaron Rasmussen, 39, a founder of MasterClass, did away with
mood boards and transitioned to worlds in 2010, while marketing a beverage
called Blood Energy Potion. The world he created for the protein-infused drink,
which is bright red and sold in packaging that resembles IV bags, involved
vampires, a fictional evil corporation and a website called Living With
Bloodlust.
“The methodology informed the terminology,” Rasmussen said. He
did not make a conscious switch from “mood board” to “world”; he just outgrew
the term.
Mood boards are “carcasses”, said Brian Collins, the chief
creative officer of Collins, a branding strategy company. “I have used
‘world-building’ since the start of my career,” he said. “I was introduced to
the idea by Marty Sklar, who led Walt Disney Imagineering for years. He walked
me through Disney World when I was 23, beautifully explaining how their stories
were brought to life through architecture, design, sound, music and even
scents.”
While designers have strong feelings about the terminology,
explaining “worlds” to clients is a different story. “I try to lean clients
into ‘world’ versus ‘mood board,’” Kanner said. “Clients don’t have the
language. They are looking to me to decide, so if I say ‘world,’ it’s a world.”
“World” appears to be the most popular replacement for “mood
board,” though some in the branding industry are partial to “brandscapes” and
“territories.” In Rasmussen’s latest venture, Outlier.org, an online
educational platform where students take for-credit college courses at
inexpensive prices, he refers to the brand guidelines as the Outlier Cinematic
Universe. “It has a very specific look to it. It’s ‘Blade Runner’ meets
Hogwarts,” he said.
Tessa Mu, 33, a founder and CEO of WithPlot, a collaboration
platform for marketers, used mood boards frequently when she worked at Marc
Jacobs. The designers there “would pin up old photographs, tear-outs from
magazines, pieces of fabric and trinkets for inspiration,” she said. “With the
rise of Pinterest at the time, mood boards were a natural way to present your
ideas and thoughts.”
Mu began hearing the term “world” about six years ago, when she
was the marketing vice president of a probiotics company called Seed Health.
“You don’t feel crazy bringing an idea to the table because you’re building a
world, not a mood board,” she said. “It makes the work more complex.”
Because the branding for Seed Health was inspired by Carl Sagan
and Neil deGrasse Tyson, Mu said, she and her colleagues even preferred the
word “universe,” because “the terminology shift awakened a lot more
possibilities.”
The only thing left now? The multiverse.
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