Do you ever wonder how some people’s visual brands are SO on point all of the time? The secret to this consistency is having your brand colors saved so you can always reference them to use for your business assets. And guess what… you don’t need to hire a brand designer, like myself, to do this. Here’s how you can build a mood board/mini brand board today.

Step one: Get on Pinterest

Pinterest is the perfect place to find your ideal brand vibes. Want a dark and moody brand? Search “dark and moody” into Pinterest. Want a light and airy brand? Search “light and airy”. (See below for examples of what I found when I typed those two phrases in). You can find so many brand inspiration pictures on Pinterest. (ps. are you following me on Pinterest?)

Step two: open up Coolors.co in your browser

This website is my secret weapon for building visual brands. I can spend hours on Coolors trying to develop the perfect color pallet for my clients. The best part? It’s totally free! All you need to do is start the generator, click the little camera icon that says “pick colors from an image”, and drag your inspiration image into the upload spot. Then, poke around on the picture until you pull the exact HEX code you want to add to your color pallet. Watch the quick video below to see it in action!

Step three: head to Canva.com to start building your mood board

Canva is my go-to for quick graphics and visual brand elements. It is a great free alternative to Adobe Illustrator (which I use to build logos and branding elements for clients). Now that you have a color pallet that you love, it’s time to give it a home. I always like to pair the color codes with the image itself, so I can look back on the image I pulled the codes off of.

While you can just save the color pallet itself, I like using mood boards to show my clients exactly where the colors came from to provide  a solid visualization element to the presentation. Pick fun grids or frames when making your mood board to give it a little flare. Click play on the video below to see exaclty how I made a simple mood board in Canva.

Step four: Save your design and admire your new mood board!

Your mood board can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be. The benefit of having a mood board is to have a place where you can store your brand colors to look back on when you need to. This helps keep your visual brand consistent.

Did you find this short tutorial useful? Comment below!