Interior Design Moodboarding: A how to guide

Moodboards are big in Interior Design, always have been, always will be. They are a really large part of how we communicate ideas to clients and hash out the design ourselves, putting things together and taking them out, rearranging then rearranging again. All that cutting and sticking, fabric swatches and paint chips bring me joy and take me straight back to the child artist in me creating with wild abandon and now I get to do it for a job! Yay!

Opposites attract to make the perfect moodboard - blues and rust red oranges are always a winning combo!

First steps in making a moodboard.

You dont need anything fancy to get making a moodboard at all and they can be both physical or digital but what you do need before starting is a colour scheme. I’ve written about his before so I’ll link you to my blog post all about colour theory (sounds complicated but trust me you can do it!) Having a colour scheme decided first limits your choices in a good way and helps you stick to the program. I like to think of a colour scheme for the house as a whole - this way all the rooms link together in perfect harmony but, if that’s overwhelming you can work backwards on this and start with a scheme for one room then as you do other rooms bear that first scheme in mind creating variations of it.

A harmonious colour scheme for a kitchen, pantry, bootroom and utility. See how there are varying shades of green paired with the lighter tile and worktops. I hope you can agree that seeing it all laid out like this helps you ensure you’re on the correct path and that it all works well together.

How to make a digital moodboard.

I do my moodboards digitally on Canva.com which is an online graphic design tool which has a free version but, honestly if you’re doing this more and more the £10 a month fee is worth every penny. Canva allows me to paste in images from around the web and really get a visual on how things will look. I use it for trying colours and furniture together.

An Interior Design of a bedroom using canva with all the products in place. This really helps clients see their design and feel immersed in it.

On canva (the paid version) there is a background remover so when you snip and image of a piece of furniture from a website you can paste it to Canva and remove the background. It’s also really easy to duplicate things and add text.

However, Canva does have it’s downsides, the biggest one being that colours are often distorted on screens and aren’t exactly true to real life. It’s not a canva thing it’s same as when you’re browsing clothes online, make a purchase and that top you loved is more canary than the lemon yellow you’d imagined! So that leads me perfectly on to my next thoughts.

A collection of greens, blue and neutrals with a pop of rust red/orange as an accent colour.

How to make physical moodboards.

Now, in Interior Designer land these physical samples of things are really called a sampleboard but for the purposes of this blog post I’ll be putting them in to the same pot and calling them mood boards. They are such an important part of getting your design right - they are the sense check shall we say.

I’d recommend creating something digitally first on canva or powerpoint so you can get everything together and then send for physical samples of everything you can so that’s paint, fabric swatches, tile, metal finishes - just everything that has a sample, get it! Then put it all together and check all the colours go and if not change it! Try to make sure that the sizes of the samples are akin to how they will be in the room so the wall colour sample should be big then the sofa sample should be big too but smaller then anything else needs to be size representative. This way you can see how colour proportions work in the scheme.

Thoughts on making moodboards

I’m gonna say it’s essential - do I sound dramatic there?! Yes, probably but honestly there’s nothing worse than dreaming of a space in your head and seeing it all perfect only to fall at the last hurdle and have to redo it. A little bit of prep and planning at this stage is a total game changer and will ensure you get room design right every time. I get the excitement and hype of having a new room but if you take one thing from me today it should be not to miss the stage.

If you’re looking for more advice on how to plan the design of your room get your free guide here

Thanks for reading,

Claire

Interior Designer Bristol.