Mood boards were once thought of as your teen daughter’s dream board back in the late ’90s but this trend is coming back with renewed interest, especially in regard to home design. In fact, Design and Living recently came out with a series of mood boards based on their most popular photos from 2018.
Mood boards are essential to grounding your aesthetic vision into reality. By taking inspiration from a variety of pictures and themes, you can curate a home you’ll love for years to come.
This doesn’t mean that you want to buy the products present in the images. Many of these aesthetic influencers will be far out of your price range. But the mood board will help hone your vision and prevent you from veering off path.
Many mood board creators are satisfied with mimicking the look of their mood board without spending a fortune on the actual products. You can always find a cheaper version that matches the vibe of your image. For example, an image of a $500 embroidered white shower curtain on your mood board looks beautiful. While buying that product is often out of reach, you can find a similar white and embroidered product instead of abandoning the idea altogether.
It can also limit the extent of your scope. While it might be tempting to choose grandiose decor or a number of bright colors, some products will be hard to find or impossible to afford. For example, orange sea glass is only found once in every 10,000 pieces. Though many people use mood boards to fulfill their fantasies, they can also help reign in unrealistic expectations.
When you want to remodel your space, it’s recommended that you create a mood board for each room. Mood boards are particularly helpful when it comes to matching color schemes and overall vibes. That black couch sounded like a good idea at the time, but it might not highlight the hues of blue you hope to accent in your living room. By putting these images together, you can visualize the space as a whole instead of a series of individual images. This is essential when an estimated 36% of sofa buyers intend to keep their furniture for up to nine years.
There are a number of ways you can create a mood board nowadays. The number of mood board sites and resources is staggering.
For example, Pinterest has seen great success as countless people design and create boards using “pinned” images. However, printing out pictures from the internet or cutting images from magazines can help you establish a mood board in the real world.
Though it might seem a little DIY, hanging a physical mood board in your home serves as a reminder of your goals. Looking at it every day can lead to innovations in creativity and serve as a catalyst to jumpstart your remodeling process.
Whether you choose to create a virtual mood board or a physical one, try to get in the habit of looking at it each day. You never know how your feelings and goals will change once you engage in the design process.
