How to Create a Mood Board for Your Coaching Brand + Website

Do you know how to create a mood board for your coaching brand? If you said yes, great. Skip to the bottom of the post, because we have some free mood board templates you can snatch up and use to create one.

If you said no, it’s time to pay attention, because I’m about to walk you through one of the most important tools you can use as a business owner to create a visually impactful brand and website design.

But first, what the heck is a mood board?

a collage of various items, as scenic snapshots, song lyrics, and mementos, used to evoke a desired feeling, style, or ambience for a project or event, and often fashioned as a starting point from which to create an inspiration board

Dictionary.com

Mood boards are a tool designers have been using for ages to help get them on the right emotional track in the design process. That’s right, I said emotional. Because mood boards are all about identifying the right feeling or vibe for a project.

If you walk in blind to a design project, you never know where it could end up. So the mood board helps you keep the vision for a project (or brand) front and center in the brain. No detours allowed.

Have you ever seen a brand that looks different when you see it in different places? On Instagram it looks bright and cheerful, but when you look at the website, it loses its vibe and looks a little dull? That’s because the brand didn’t have a mood board. There was no consistent starting point to refer back to.

And that’s what I want to help you avoid with your coaching brand, by teaching you how to create a mood board you can use to visually inspire yourself and stick to.

How to Create a Mood Board for Your Coaching Brand

Step 1: Choose Your Moodboard Medium

The first step in creating a mood board is deciding whether you’ll do it physically, or digitally.

Do you want to get hands-on and find images in magazines, fabric swatches, and other things you can glue to a poster board so you can see and touch your mood board?

Or do you want to work digitally for convenience and/or just because you like your computer? Either way is great.

You just have to decide which one will inspire you more. If you decide to go digital, we have some mood board templates on Canva that you can use for free. You just have to sign up to get access to our free business resource library.

If you decide to work physically, you’re on your own. Go hit up the craft store, my friend.

Step 2: Choose The Purpose of Your Moodboard

Next up, you need to identify the purpose of your mood board. You might be thinking, “But Cass, you just said the mood board was to represent my brand and give me something to refer to…that’s the purpose.”

Yes, but no. What I mean by identifying the purpose of your mood board is… you have to choose the feeling you want your mood board, and therefore your brand, to evoke in other people.

That means you have to choose 2–3 emotions you want people to feel when they come in contact with your brand.

Do you want your brand to be evocative, bold, and sexy?

Maybe it’s cheerful, fun, and flirty?

Or calming, professional, and steady?

Think about what you do in your coaching business, and what you want to help your clients achieve. What do they need to feel about your brand in order to trust you to get them those results?

Step 3: Source Inspiration Images

Now that you know the feeling you’re trying to create with your brand, it’s time to start sourcing inspiration images and content to put on your mood board.

A great place to start is Pinterest, whether you’re working digitally or physically (remember — you can always print pictures out from the internet and glue them to your board if you want — it’s your board…work how you want!).

Start typing search terms into the Pinterest search bar and see what comes up. Do the images inspire you? If they do, save some of them to a secret board and keep going.

You’re always better off saving a bunch of images and narrowing it down later, rather than only having a few to work with and feeling stuck or dissatisfied with the final result.

Hint: if you’re having trouble finding images that you like, try adding the word ‘aesthetic’ to the end of the emotions you chose for your board. Like ‘cheerful aesthetic’ or ‘bold aesthetic.’ It’s a secret designer trick that somehow seems to make Pinterest work harder for ya…sometimes.

Step 4: Make Your Coaching Moodboard Pretty

Once you have at least 20 images to start working with, you can start to play around with your mood board design.

Your goal is to test the images and inspiration you’ve gathered by putting them together in different arrangements until you can feel the emotions you’re trying to create.

There should be a moment where you look at the collage you’ve created and it just seems right.

It feels beautiful and inspiring to you, evokes the emotion you want your brand to exude, and makes you want to share your brand to the entire world.

Don’t be afraid to switch out images you love if something feels off. Sometimes, it’s one image that’s making a mood board not come together, and oftentimes it’s the image you were trying to force in from the beginning because you fell in love with it.

If the mood board won’t come together, start over using a different first image.

Final Thoughts

Now you know the basic steps on how to create a mood board, so it’s time to get started.

A mood board will help you maintain the correct vision and vibe for your brand while you create all sorts of different marketing pieces to grow it: from social media graphics to your website, and everything in between, whether it’s online or in print.

Always make sure to keep your board handy whenever you’re working on your business, so you can constantly remind yourself of what you’re trying to say with your brand in both text and design.

Download Our Free Canva Mood Board Templates

In our free resource library for coaches, we’ve included Canva mood board templates that you can use to get started in creating your own brand mood board.

The templates include 4 different layouts that you can play with, adding your own preferred images and choosing your own colors, until you land on the perfect vibe for your business.

Get instant access to the mood board templates by signing up here.