Against the mood board.

§I A tool doing damage.

The mood board is the single most commonly used tool at the start of brand engagements, and the tool most responsible for the category's current aesthetic indistinguishability. The mood board is not the cause of every derivative brand. It is the proximal cause of most of them. Removing it from the firm's working practice, which we did in 2019, was the largest single upgrade to the quality of our brand output in the last decade.

What a mood board does, structurally, is lock the brand's aesthetic decision into existing aesthetic decisions made by other brands, magazines, photographers, and moments. Everything on the mood board is somebody else's work. The brand, choosing from the board, is choosing from a set of answers already produced by the aesthetic context the board reflects. The brand cannot, from this starting position, produce a genuinely unprecedented aesthetic. It can only produce a considered recombination of the board's inputs.

§II The recombination trap.

Considered recombination is not, by itself, a bad outcome. It produced quite a lot of respected brand work in the 2010s. The problem is that considered recombination, as an industry practice, converges. A dozen brands, each using a board of high-quality inputs, each recombining those inputs with talent, will produce a dozen brands that look, at a glance, like each other. The mood board makes the glance inevitable.

This is what the category sees now. Scroll through any Awwwards-era consumer brand launch from 2021 onwards. The boards were, in almost every case, well-made. The execution was competent. The brands, lined up, look like fifteen variants of the same brand. The mood board got them all to the same moment.

Removing the mood board does not, in itself, produce distinctive work. It removes the structural force that was, silently, dragging work towards convergence. It opens the possibility of distinctive work; it does not guarantee it. What guarantees it is a different starting document.

A mood board is a list of places your brand already exists. The job is to find a place your brand does not yet exist. — Saoirse Hale

§III What we use instead.

We use three documents at the start of brand work. The first is a written brand thesis — a three-to-four-page prose document describing the argument the brand intends to make about itself, the category, and the consumer. No images. The second is an observed-object list: twenty physical objects, not images of objects, that live in the brand's universe and inform its taste. Not references; objects to be handled. The third is a written aesthetic forbiddings list — the moves the brand explicitly will not make, with reasons.

The thesis does the argumentative work the mood board was doing badly. The object list does the tactile, specific work the mood board cannot do at all. The forbiddings list forces the team to confront, in writing, the category-default moves they would otherwise reach for. Between the three, the team has the inputs for distinctive work without the convergence force the mood board imposes.

Creatively, these three documents are more difficult to work from than a mood board. The mood board offers immediate visual comfort. The three-document brief offers structured resistance. The resistance is what produces the distinctive output.

§IV Why clients resist.

Clients resist the removal of the mood board for a specific and understandable reason: the mood board is legible to the client in a way the three documents are not. A founder can flip through a mood board in five minutes and feel they have seen the brand. A three-document brief requires them to read. This is a real cost, and it is the cost they are paying, quietly, for distinctive work.

Our practice is to walk the client through the three documents in person, once, at length, at the start of the engagement. The walkthrough is about ninety minutes. By the end of it the client has understood that the brand's thesis is the anchor and the aesthetic will emerge from it. The next time the client sees aesthetic material it will be work — not references. This is difficult for some clients. The ones who accept it produce better brands.

§V The defensive case for mood boards.

Honesty requires a defensive case. There are circumstances in which a mood board is useful. In early brand exploration, before the thesis is written, a mood board can act as a visual-thinking exercise for the team — material to be pinned, discussed, and then thrown away. We keep this practice alive, internally, as an early exploration tool, and delete the board before the thesis is written. It is a scratchpad, not a brief.

The error is in treating the mood board as the brief. The brief is the thesis. The mood board, if it exists, is a vestigial thinking exercise that should be discarded before the real work begins. We do not give mood boards to designers as the basis for a brand; we give them written thinking and handled objects. The output is, inside eighteen months, visibly different.