How to - Create a Design Mood Board.
This week we invited Natasha Burton, interior designer extraordinaire, from NB interiors to walk us through how she creates a design mood board. Natasha specialises in creating interiors that are meaningful and bespoke. Just like us, she loves using interiors to tell a stories and reflect personalities.
If you’re planning to update your living room or perhaps you are having an extension built and you want to plan how the new space will look, a good idea is to pull all your thoughts into a mood board. But where to start. If you’re not a designer this could feel an overwhelming task in itself.
Fear not, here are some tips on how to put together a mood board which helps you streamline your thoughts and ideas and see what could actually work together. This is so helpful for people who like lots of different styles and need help working out exactly what they prefer and for those who know what they like but can’t quite visualise it all together.
Asess
First place to start is have a good look around you in the space you are going to tackle. What are you working with? Is it a bright and open space or a dark and dim room? What do you wish to achieve in the room? Set out your goals and requirements, this can really help hone what is relevant versus what you think just looks nice. Measure the space, work out where the electrical sockets and radiators are as these can impact your design.
Inspiration
OK so you’ve done the initial assessment of the parameters you’re working with now it’s the fun stage of gathering all of your inspo. So where do you get your inspo from? Well there are the obvious and great choices of Pinterest and Instagram. But think outside the box a little here. Have you been to a great hotel, bar, restaurant, store etc? What drew you to it, did you love the styling, the colour, the lighting? Good old fashioned magazines are packed with style inspo. How about the inspiration pages on your favourite brands websites – here you find curated design ideas that you can draw from.
Colour Schemes
For colour schemes, it’s a similar process and again dare to be brave here. So you know what colours you want or have narrowed it down to a few. Don’t just look to interiors here. There are so any places for inspiration for colour schemes and combinations. Take a look at your surroundings, nature is full of gorgeous colours. Look at art, artists work with colour, what colour schemes can you find there? Retail stores also coordinate their clothing into colour packages so you can also be inspired by great colour combinations here too.
Mood Boards
Not sure whether to create a physical or digital mood board? Well this will come down to your personal preference and what you have access to. Digital mood boards allow you to have so much flexibility or putting things in and moving them around. You can grab images from websites and pick colours. If you aren’t the most technical then a physical mood board still allows you to create a vision for your room. This may suit the more creative people too, get your paint brush out, find fabric samples and magazine cut outs to help you curate your perfect design.
Blend
Once you have pulled together your images whether physical or digital, start to piece them together to gain an insight into how your design could look. Once you are happy with the direction the design is going and you’re clear on the colour palette, begin sourcing for specific products to formulate the design. I always describe pulling together a design like a jigsaw puzzle, all the pieces have to fit and it’s not necessarily an easy and quick task. You have so many variables to work to such as budget, design style, delivery lead times, size, material, colour etc. You have to carefully consider this for every item in the room, as they all have to work together. You want a good mixture of materials and texture to create a visually impactful design that is stylish and is a feast for the eyes. Again you can follow the same process you did for the initial mood board but this time with the chosen items so you can see if all you have picked out really does look amazing together.
Be unique!
If you’re looking to create a more individual and unique interior, my one piece of advice is to not follow the crowd. Why try to look like the images you like on Instagram? Create your own vibe and start a trend instead. How do you do this? Well, look for those independent brands as they can offer different choice and different to the norm options. Take time to curate the perfect design. Shop around, enjoy the experience.
You can see more of Natasha's incredible work at nbinteriorsuk.com
