Mood Boards - Designer's Essential
“Words fail miserably when trying to translate design concepts”
Step one for designers (especially graphic designers) is pouring ideas onto the drawing board/sketchbook/recycable Starbucks brown tissue paper underneath your vanilla latte or even right on computer screen. It's just one of the first things you start doing.
We often think we had it in our heads : solutions, brilliant ideas, and picture-perfect compositions. But even if you are talented and your work is top-notch, it's easy to misread client's expectations. What one person calls "edgy", another might see as chaotic. A picture is worth a thousand words, and mood boards are a great tool to create that picture for your client.
Mood boards, are used in a variety of disciplines. In essence, they are a compilation of inspirational elements used by designers to flesh out ideas at the beginning of a design project. It's extremely useful for establishing the aesthetic feel, and it fits into the process somewhere after wireframes and before design mockups.
Things that can be explored in the mood board include photographic styles, color palettes, typography, patterns, and the overall look and feel. Soft or hard? Grungy or clean? Dark or light?
The mood board is intentionally casual; it lets the designer start with broad strokes and get feedback before too much time is invested in wrong direction.
So, what are the possible benefits?
Faster mockup production, smoother client buy-in and furthermore, less frustation-more fun.
Resvera-what?
“The old Roman saying, 'In Vino Sanitas' - In Wine there is health. Would you be surprised if one day there is an Indonesian saying: In Melinjo We Trust?”
Resveratrol is a powerful antioxidant that is produced by some plants to protect against environmental stresses. Perhaps the most notable producer of resveratrol is the grapevine, which produces large amounts of resveratrol in the skins of grapes to protect against fungal diseases and sun damage. It is therefore no surprise that wine (in particular, red wine - which is fermented with grape skins) has some of the highest levels of resveratrol out of any natural food.
While it has been know for thousand of years that wine is a healthful drink, the scientific community started taking wine's health benefits seriously after 60 Minutes (CBS News) reported the famous 'French Paradox' study in which people in France were less likely to die of heart attacks than American despite similar high fat diets. The study concluded that the relatively large amounts of red wine consumed by the French protected their hearts.
There are studies recently (haven't gone public yet), concluded that Resveratrol is also found in Gnetum Gnemon (Melinjo, as Indonesians call it), a species of Gnetum native to southeast Asia (Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam), whose fruit consists of little but skin and a large nut-like seed 2-4 cm long inside.
We know that it won't be that long until revelations about Melinjo / Gnetum Gnemon are unveiled. Stay tuned. One of our client is going to publish the news worldwide.