My Mood Board Process In-Depth

0:00now this video is going to be an interpretation of pretty much exactly what I do when I'm doing a creative direction for a client two things the first thing is I will always present my client with two concepts I will very rarely do three the reason for that is because if you've done a rigorous strategy and you've done a discovery process I actually find with my creative process there's not very many different directions you can go in in order to achieve the goals and to talk to an audience in the correct way or at least in the best way for the client and for that audience and so I

0:34usually find it very difficult to come up with three totally different ideas when I've got one place to go to so my map for example will have two routes that will have the expected route one that feels a little safer and it feels a little more comfortable for the client something that they might have been imagining something that's going to fit with the industry and is going to just be a really good interpretation of the brand the second direction is usually one that I've injected a little bit more creative finesse into and it's something slightly more off the cuff or it's maybe inspired by the aspirational audience

1:10for their client so for example they've got a current client base and they're actually wanting to talk to a new client base I will then actually design a mood board specifically for that new client base so there's a couple different ways that you can do root boards and directions and how you come up with two different directions really depends on your creative process for me the directions that I do are usually based off of the client's audience or two different types of goals or if in the distract Discovery process I've picked up a slight disparity in personality maybe they want to be in this way and a little bit that

1:48way I'll show them what the two ends of that scale look like and that's really kind of just how I focus on the directions and how I decide how those two directions are going to look so before I get into showing you how I create them I first want to recommend with the creative direction that you're doing always start out with a brain dump or a word map or a mind map whatever you want to call it grab a notebook and a pen and basically just word art all the ideas you can think of conceptually for the brand now one can argue that this is something that you should really only do

2:25when you're doing the logo but I like to start right at the beginning because when it comes down to what types of logo inspiration I'm going to look at what types of icons and color palettes I want to pull in I want to be making sure that I've got a focus early on in the process Because the Internet is a big place and there is so much out there that if I don't already have my goggles on and know what I'm looking for I could spend days scrolling through Pinterest alone and never mind other places where you can get inspiration from so for today's project we're actually going to be

3:00looking at a boutique luxury hotel with three different destinations here in lovely South Africa which is where I'm from in case you didn't know that they've got a beach destination a bushfelt destination or should I say Safari destination for those of you who don't know what bushfelt means and they've also got a sort of a mountain resort as well so we're going to be putting together the a mood board or creative direction for them now in the Strategic Discovery process we uncovered that they really want to keep that small boutique large feel with slightly more classic touches so they don't want to be too modern their buildings are very full

3:43of character they've been around a long time and so we don't want to over modernize the brand however they do want to appeal to a slightly younger audience one that is not necessarily traveling through Airbnb but have got um they're looking for interesting destinations interesting types of travel and so they're looking to stay at these really interesting and exciting places so we're going to try and create two different directions for this Lodge and already what I'm thinking is that we're going to go for the typical sort of Boutique Hotel look they are not huge on pushing the envelope they enjoy tradition they are classic hospitality and so they don't really want to push

4:32the envelope too much they're not interested in being too Millennial but they are interested in attracting sort of the older Millennial group and Beyond couples small family groups Etc and even looking at corporate events so with all of that in mind I'm keeping those two thoughts when I'm going to be looking for inspiration so in terms of my mind map the words that I'm looking at are classic eclectic a little bit something unexpected I want to look for warm traditional tones that speak to Heritage and family and looking to kind of bring into the logo something unexpected so when I'm diving into looking for inspiration I'm going to

5:19keep all of those things in mind knowing as well that we've got an interesting Market that we need to attract and we're competing against things like Airbnb and the big hotel names as well so with all of that in mind I'm gonna jump straight into Pinterest and I'm basically just going to start looking for all sorts of inspiration it's got anything to do with hospitality hotels and the types of ideas that I really want to get across [Music] so before I jump into Pinterest I want to give you some advice on what you're looking for when you're coming up with the perfect mood board it's very easy to

5:59slap a whole bunch of inspiration that you think looks cool but you've got to remember we're designing a brand identity and so your mood board has got to include certain things they're going to help you make creative decisions in the future when you're designing the brand you need to include things like logo inspiration for the different types of logos you want to create keep in mind the differences between Styles like Sans serif versus serif ornate versus simple Etc and you want to make sure that you're creating distinct sort of groupings for those logo Styles then you want to make sure that you're starting to pull together a color palette now the

6:34color palette can come from imagery or it can come from other references but you want to start thinking about color and then you actually want to make a note of that in the mood board so that the client can already start aligning themselves around that color palette the next thing is you want to look at stationary examples so is this brand going to need to be applied to anything in the real world something like business cards or letterheads or stationery in terms of envelopes or info booklets or things like that as well as web applications as well so it doesn't need to be an app does it need to be

7:10applied to digital digital invoicing systems Etc keep all of that in mind when you're looking for inspiration you want to be able to show the client what the brand is going to look like in the real world how it's going to live out because that's going to give them that sense of life that's going to give them that sense of longevity and that the brand is actually more than just the logo of course if you're only designing the logo then you know it's still important to show them how your logo solution could fit on collateral in the future the next thing that you really want to include is things like

7:44illustration Styles or graphic styling pattern work anything else that you think might be relevant especially for a brand that's got things like packaging e-commerce businesses Etc product businesses even a hotel something like that which is going to have a lot of printed stationery and things that The Branding is going to need to be applied to otherwise known as touch points Livery collateral whatever you want to call it so you want to be including something like that then of course typography you really need to include examples of typography and not just typography from the logos perspective but actual lived typography so how is the brand going to show up in terms of

8:25letterheads or font choices or things like that for social media or for print collateral you want to be looking at typography as well there's a couple of other things that I like to include which are bonuses like photographic direction or art direction of some kind if that's relevant for the brand of course steer clear of adding things that have got nothing to do with the brand whatsoever if your client has said I don't want business cards then by all means please don't include a reference of business cards because the key with creative direction is that it's custom to the client custom to the project that you're actually showing

9:04thought and consideration for the references you're choosing and looking to add to your mood board this is how you're going to start creating mood boards that your clients are going to get really excited about as opposed to creating something that just looks like a cookie cutter mood board straight off of Pinterest okay with that being said let's jump straight in to the Pinterest board that I've created for our make believe boutique hotel brand and what we've got here is a number of different reference says I went through and basically gathered all the different ideas that I had for the two directions I want to explore for this brand so

9:44because we're not actually going to get as far as doing the logo maybe in another video let me know in the comments below we're just doing the mood board today and so I want to just let loose creatively and I want to think about different ways of doing this okay so the first idea that I had one that's going to be a little closer to what I believe the client is imagining in their heads is going to be anything to do with this gold and deep blue this is a creative direction that um really fits with their strategy their desire to be classic refined um but still traditional and still kind

10:24of you know celebrated as still one of those classic boutique hotels so it's not this Airbnb Vibe it's still got this um it's got a little bit of old school hotel in it so if that makes any sense at all but this is basically what pops into my head when I think of it so we've got references like this with quite ornate shapes the family who started the lodge or Hotel Group itself um the hotel has remained in the family for many generations now and so they've actually got what's called a family crest and conceptually I'm trying to look at a way of maybe including something that looks a little bit like

11:04that uh for the brand the next thing I'm also thinking about as I'm going along grabbing inspiration is how we can apply this to of course stationary so I'm thinking about menu cards business cards stamps I love the gold I think it's going to be a really good idea I'm also pulling inspiration like this where we're talking about the application of The Branding onto Hotel specific items and I thought applying the logo or some sort of creative device to the hangers or something like that in the rooms is also just a special luxury touch which adds that extra flavor then I started to think about the

11:47destinations themselves and the fact that there are this beautiful blend of rustic luxury so the destinations are made up of these beautiful small buildings they're in the wild they've got beautiful views Etc and I really wanted to try and bring in some natural texture as well it's a nice way of making things feel a little bit more warm while still being quite premium so I thought about blending in Wood textures with a bit of leather a bit of stone taking inspiration from the environments where the different destinations actually are all and then I started thinking well what if each of the different destinations had a bit of

12:29an illustration or something to characterize that individual piece so there's sort of the overarching brand and then there will be the three different properties underneath that with their own styling so we've got ribbons we've got Maps here we've got room and information cards possibly little welcome cards or something like that a couple of photographic inspiration pieces as well simple clean um so there's that juxtaposition between appealing to the modern traveler but still keeping that traditional rustic feel with a little bit of the Heritage so there's a lot going on here but I'm thinking that we'll be able to create two distinct mood boards here and I can already see that I've got two

13:16color directions I can go with the blue or I can go with the green or maybe even blend the two I've got inspiration like this which I'm really liking because I definitely think I want to show them what maybe some Custom Hotel postcards could look like room key labels Etc so there's a lot going on here that we can add and you can see that my Pinterest board is not that huge so this will vary depending on the client and depending on the project sometimes I get super clear on the ideas really quickly and so my Pinterest boards are slightly less heavy other times I've got

13:53like seven different ideas for directions that I could go in with little fleeting sort of pieces of inspiration as I'm looking for stuff and so it really just depends on the project but I will then come to my Pinterest board right at the end before I start making the mood board and I'll start culling and basically what that means is I'll start looking at inspiration and changing my mind about whether I think it's relevant so basically another example of this is I looked at this one and as much as I like this and I like The Rustic feel I feel like it's too rustic for the destinations and

14:30so what I will probably do now is come in here and actually try and delete it but now of course I can't remember how to use Pinterest so there's that um but basically you you're gonna go through and simplify the mood board take some stuff off that you don't like and then this could be considered as a mood board on its own but you don't want to show your client this you want to show them a curated version where you've made very specific decisions about what you include and what not to include so with all that being said let's jump straight into Adobe Illustrator and actually

15:03start curating our inspiration and coming up with our two visual directions okay so jumping straight into Adobe Illustrator all I'm really going to do is create a 1080 by 1080 artboard and this is where I'm going to create my squares so usually I know that there's a quicker way to do this I've seen the hack on Instagram but blow me down I cannot actually work out how to do it so it's maybe because I'm not paying enough attention to the detail but I basically just create nine squares I put them like this and then I just use essentially I will then group them and send them to

15:43the artboard and ungroup again and now I've got my boards okay so the first thing I'm going to do is first just take the outline off I hate working with outlines on this particular thing and then I will give them usually a very light gray so that I can see what I'm dealing with and then basically the hack looks as follows so I will now open up my Pinterest board on the one side and illustrator on the other side and what I'm going to do now is start dragging so the first thing I want to do is try and nail down the first Direction which is this navy blue one it's a

16:21little bit more typical it's a little bit more Classic Hotel so I want to do that one because I think it's the safe option and I think it goes in line with what the client wants and with some of the decor and things like that okay now what I'm going to do is basically just click and drag and this works sometimes doesn't always work it should most of the time on a Mac just work to literally click and drag and it'll drop it into in illustrator you won't see it straight away but if you click in then it suddenly appears so yeah all right so I

16:50want some stationery I also want some photographic Direction I think that's quite nice I love the idea of this really sort of tall text it's very it's very premium but I'm thinking that with the logo design we could theoretically add a little bit of character to it and give it a bit of an edge so we could do something like that I'm looking at this inspiration and I'm liking it but it looks very corporate so I'm wanting to see if I can maybe find something that's a little bit more uh correct for them and maybe something like this but I can see the blue tones here aren't exactly right but I'll bring

17:26it in anyway so I can have a look love the illustration sort of style I definitely think some sort of embossing but maybe something a little bit see this is very premium I'm wondering if I've got something that's just a little bit more rugged I definitely like this um might be a little bit I like the nature part of that one um okay love the leather here it's a nice contrast and maybe this one to have a look at um and then maybe also I'm just gonna see if there's anything so sometimes with Pinterest if you click on it then you carry on down you can see references

18:10that are very similar um and that's really really helpful it's a really good trick when you're when you're looking on Pinterest specifically for inspiration so what I'm seeing is there's a lot of uh stuff that looks very wedding like um but this is very Regal which I like you drag that in um a reminder to go back and save it obviously uh which is quite useful of course um okay so I think that's cool there now I definitely oh I love this key I want to see if I can try and incorporate that maybe I can incorporate some of this but not all of it because it's a very long

18:51image um I like the maps maybe if we could find something else that's map focused because creating destination maps for hotels is really really cool especially layouts of the the camp or the lodge or the hotel itself to show guests where everything is maybe something like this or something like this of course just save them as you go along um love this idea this is nice but might be a little too beachy a little bit too um nautical okay maybe a little touch of the brown and the leather would be quite nice to bring in on this um I'm also just going to pull this in

19:38I think this is going to fit better with the other concept that I've got in my hand so I'll keep those for that all right now I'm going to click back into illustrator bring my screen out okay now you can see some of the inspiration has come across as a link because that doesn't always work especially if the the the post on Pinterest itself was a a video or a or a gif or something GIF gif um okay so now basically what I'm going to do is pull this all aside and the next thing for mental Clarity for myself at least is I'm going to start grouping

20:12these so this is all stationary and collateral this is Textra and embossing style illustration slash graphics up here logo style photographic direction also stationary hmm what is the also stationary let's put this under embossing I mean more or less okay I've only got one for Logos so maybe this can come in for logo style so you can see now that I don't really have enough inspiration or something to pull in terms of logo style so now I'm just going to go back to Pinterest and I'm going to see if I can pull something else that is going to be a little bit more logo style focused so I want to

21:01make sure that I've got inspiration that covers everything because without that it's obviously going to be very difficult to get the client aligned around a certain style of logo so this direction my thought was definitely more along this line where we've got some sort of a Crest or an icon supported by typography this one I feel like is a little bit too Regal um but maybe something like this could work um quite well let's have a look at what other inspiration pops up when it comes to this see I think I'm definitely thinking that we need a balance this is quite nice so let's grab let's grab that I think that's going to

21:49give us a nice balance of logo styles okay so now what I've got is a whole bunch of inspiration now I'm gonna pull aside the things that I think are really going to work well for this um this project so I really like that I think I really like the more see this is where I'm going to start tying things in the slightly more modern illustration so you get that celebration of old versus new I really like this for this brand I think that's great let's have some photographic Direction and maybe some stationery so how are we gonna bring the contrast in we need a bit of texture going on here so maybe

22:30maybe a bit of The Rustic texture as well okay so in order to start putting these things in now basically what you can do is you can drag it shift command bracket left bracket for shortcut on Mac you put it behind everything make sure that you've selected both and then you just command seven and that is going to give you the opportunity to mask it with that shape so that you can move the things around within the frame without having to try and crop the images so basically if you now want to edit how that is you just double click it takes you into the clipping group and now you

23:07can move things around within that square um and you can just position it as you like so I'm going to try and put some of this stuff in now and we'll see how it goes so usually what I'm trying to do with my mood boards is create balance and oftentimes what I will do is put the lighter inspiration pieces in the middle squares in the darker inspiration pieces in the corners if it's relevant and often what I'll try and do is split so if there's a photographic inspiration I'll split that with a with something that's more digital so that you get a nice visual break and your eye can sort

23:42of dance around and look at different pieces of inspiration without getting too overwhelmed okay so now I've realized I don't really have enough inspiration so I'm going to start bringing in some other ideas and putting those in sometimes in my mood boarding process I'll actually pick up that I've like not aligned things properly um and then that's relatively easy to fix just with your like alignment tools so you can just go back and fix this obviously I do like the spacing and stuff to be properly balanced um you can see here that this is not quite right but that's because the image isn't fitting in the frame property

24:22so I'll just come in here and make this a little bit bigger and just make sure it's fitting in the frame properly as I wanted to get out of your clipping mask you just double click anywhere on the image and it'll take you back out again okay so I like where this is going um it's creating it's giving me good sort of Vibes I'm going to try and incorporate this key somehow maybe I should do it like this um I don't love that so the other idea is sometimes when I've got an image that doesn't quite fit I actually make it much smaller and I balance it in

25:05and then I take the frame itself and just color pick so that I can balance it in the middle um obviously you can only do that when you've got a color you've got an image a reference that's you know fully that actually fits and doesn't have um a nuanced background so sometimes what I will do now with the middle of the mood board is I'll either try and put the color palette there or I'll actually try and put the audience there so I try and find a reference picture of the clientele and I usually pull this from my strategy docs because in my strategies I usually create personas for

25:44the client customer personas and then I usually pull that image in so that they can get the reference of the fact that this might appeal to that certain client but just for the sake of this mood board particularly I'm gonna try and actually bring in some color so usually what I just do is um some color panels and how I duplicated that was I just alt and drag alt click and drag and then I just go command D which duplicates the previous movement um which works quite well so I'm going to make this a bit smaller um and then I'm actually gonna because what I want to do

26:24is I have two smaller ones and two bigger ones I'm going to pull those out to match and then basically I'm just use my Color Picker tools to try and find color and I really like the idea of the blue and the brown and maybe the beige and then I'm thinking yeah so this is a really nice neutral palette maybe a darker beige or something like that would work really lovely um and then I usually just take these colors um and make them a bit smaller so that it sort of stands out um quite nicely the other thing I could do is just move this around

27:06so that the two dark colors aren't right next to each other I don't know how does that look yeah that looks quite nice now I just want to make sure that they are positioned correctly I know I'm being very specific about how I like things to be fitted I don't like the white gaps so [Music] okay cool I'm going to group that and I'm just going to center it show that it's centered cool okay so I'm liking this and now what I sometimes do is I'll take this and I just pull out another one I go into my color color guide here and you can pick tones

27:49so I just try and pick a lighter tone just to see how the two contrast because this color now needs to fit with this color so maybe the lighter tone actually comes from this tone here instead and I pick a different color for that so what I'll do now is I'll come in and grab another tone for this and I'm just thinking maybe it actually needs to be another version of the brown and so it's okay interesting so this is a very gray brown so let's have a look at that now as a color palette and see what I think of that maybe what we could try do sometimes literally

28:32just flipping the layout works very nicely as well um loving that so what I'll do is I'll just undo she just liked the Simplicity of the other one okay of course when you're doing creative Direction with your clients you can also disclaimer that the color palette could change slightly depending on um of course what you actually end up with so with that being said I think this is the first mood board that we've got sorted out and the next few steps will be me working out what to do with the rest of the color palettes or the rest of the inspiration should I say and creating that second mood board okay so

29:15it's been a little while and I've spent some time sorting out the second version of the creative direction for our Boutique Hotel and I'll quickly talk you through some of my decisions so I think when creating mood boards you can either go totally different like I said or your mood boards will probably follow a kind of a theme and there'll be similar overlaps between the concepts and I think that this is actually a good thing because it shows that you're kind of in one-minded direction for the brand sometimes and I'll show you an example in a minute of a brand direction that actually had three totally different

29:51concepts sometimes you can take a brand in multiple different directions depending on what the client's focus is going to be for this imaginary client specifically the direction is sort of very similar on the left we've got our um as mentioned we've got a little bit more typical Hotel Direction one that is a little bit more refined it's got that beautiful deep blue so it does feel a little bit more professional and it feels a little bit more luxurious and then we've got our second Direction which is me leveraging off of the imaginary sort of phrasing from the client which was they didn't want to give up the rugged feel and The Rustic

30:32sort of inspiration of nature so I wanted to bring that in and using obviously this is a conceptual project so this is not real and but in a in a real life project especially with hospitality you want photographs of the actual destination of The Lodges or the hotels or the or the rooms themselves that you can start getting a feel for whether or not The Branding is actually going to support what the place looks like so this is kind of a snapshot of what one of the sort of Premium rooms looks like at one of The Lodges this is kind of an inspiration piece for how

31:05they can bring texture and a little bit of that refined luxury in we've got the stone and the wood showcasing here with the Deep green and the gold which I thought was a really nice way of bringing in a bit of luxury for this direction I also wanted to recommend to them that we step away from the sort of very modern refined illustrative look which still gives it that personal feel but is a little bit more premium and then instead for this direction we're going for a little bit more of like an on the nose natural feel with these more scientifically accurate illustrations which I love the idea of

31:44and I think that it would really really work for this brand it's going to give it that sort of unique feel and it's also going to be very reminiscent of being outside and in nature and the celebration of the art of bringing in natural textures into a space the logo direction for this direction as well I wanted to sort of balance it between a nice stately premium look which is going to celebrate the Heritage stall but then I wanted to see if we could balance it with some handwriting um but definitely you can see across both directions technically speaking the logos are very similar because I feel in my mind for this brand

32:25there is really only kind of one look that I'm going for for the logo that I think is really going to work and then it's just going to come down to font selection and the exact way we bring in illustration so with that being said now typically what I will go and do is I would either do a third concept and I said earlier on in this video that it's very rare that I'll do a third concept there are some certain circumstances where that is needed and I'll show you an example of that in a second but for this brand two directions is enough and I think that that's great so we've got a

32:59slightly different color palette going on and now what I will probably do is take these two concepts and give them each a name or a title of some kind or somehow put them in a bucket so that it's easier for the client to understand that they are different and that they will need to choose an option so what we'll typically do is we'll take these I'll export them out as high-res jpegs and then I will pop them in to a presentation template that I have on file and I do tend to adapt this template to fit with different clients and different projectors projectors different projects but most of the time

33:39it follows the same method so let's jump straight in to what that template actually looks like and it's it's really called the creative Direction template and this I've stripped back just slightly for the sake of this video but I always include who it's for who is prepared by and then some contact details and I think it's really really important to focus on how you present your mood boards because how we present our work is almost more important if not the most important part of the designer process because it's your job to translate and to make sure that your creative decisions actually make sense for your client

34:20and often they don't really understand the benefit of a mood board they've maybe never done one before they're not really sure what they're looking at and so you've really got to guide them through the process of why we're doing this in the first place why this step is important what they need to be looking out for and how they need to be giving you feedback so I usually just pop it into a template like this I usually remind them of why this is important I then go back and iterate some stuff about this strategy and so what I will then do is talk about the brand themselves some of their

34:53values and then I'll also talk about the premium or the primary should I say goal for this brand because what that's going to do is it's going to help us remember what's important about the brand when it comes to deciding on a creative Direction and then I'll go in to presenting the concepts so this is an example of a real client presentation that I send out to give or take a few details here and there that have been changed for the presentation for the video but this is pretty bang on for what I would present to a client and so I would then take those Hotel mood

35:31boards and put them into a presentation very similar to this so the first concept which I named making a statement this was the culmination of that concept and you'll see what I usually do with the mood boards is I add labeling to them because sometimes what I do is inside the descriptions I'll reference one or two of the images it also helps my client when they're giving feedback be able to reference a certain image and give me specific feedback on that specific one rather than going oh it's the third image from the left and there'll be up so this just becomes a lot easier and then I'm going to touch

36:07on a couple of key things when presenting so I'm first going to talk about the core concept of this mood board so what was I thinking about what was the overarching idea when it came to presenting the concept and what types of things was I really wanting to anchor on I'll then touch on color type choices imagery choices and then texture or patterns or creative devices like illustration just depends on the actual concept and then always going to include a color palette and you can see there's lots of different ways of doing the mood boards one of the directions which I mentioned is putting the audience or

36:46client themselves in the actual mood board which creates a little bit of alignment and familiarity for the client they can kind of see themselves existing in this brand space so I find that works really well but also popping the color palette in the middle like we did for our hotel mood boards works as well then I'll present the second concept with another name the refined professional and here you can see the juxtaposition of ideas and creativity I think with the hotel mood boards you can see that there's a lot of overlap and that we're really in One Direction but with this one there are two very

37:23distinct and you'll see the third one is also very different because in the Strategic Discovery process we worked out that you know all of these words were very important but when it came down to which words were the most important that was what I wanted to clarify now of course one could argue that these words could definitely be applied to this mood board but that's where describing the core concept comes in and it really describes what elements I want to focus on because if we try to do all of this and all of the one from the previous Direction and we try to create a brand that was all of

38:00those things yikes so what I'm actually trying to do here is distill write down and say to him okay cool what are your key priorities what are the things that are the most important to you is it being refined slick clean modern or do you want a little bit of an edge do you want a little bit of grunge do you want that dark contrast to what is really important to you because if we're clear then it's going to be a lot easier to create a brand identity that follows so this was the second Direction and then the third Direction totally different this was called boldly unique and this

38:38was what I called my wild card this was a concept that um I I wasn't sure that he would like but I had a feeling and I knew that he'd spoken about wanting to stand out and wanting to be unique and in our Discovery process realized that he didn't just want to be that way he was already that way at least in my eyes and I think part of my job as a designer and essentially when you become you get to that stage in your career where you're now trying to encourage these business owners to be ambitious to be brave to take steps to creating a

39:16brand identity that they can Aspire towards I often get comments from clients saying you know they feel like they've got to now live up to their branding which is very humbling for me but it also gives me a little pat on the back because isn't that exciting for clients to look at their branding and go what a cool thing to be able to create and so I always like to create a little bit of a wild card for my clients and ironically he ended up going with this direction said it really stood out to him really attracted the the edgy side of him and that enjoys interesting arts

39:50and shape um and wanted to create a personality industry that was distinct um we ended up actually blending a little bit of this concept with this last concept literally just by bringing in um a couple of sort of more structured Line work as well as toning down the orange a little bit and bringing in a green as well so it actually ended up really nice and it was really exciting to look at so you can see here that I've changed this to shapes and creative devices so you can adapt it but I think it's really important to annotate your creative directions talk your client through what

40:31you were thinking when you made these choices so that it's not just a case of slapping a bunch of images together and going hey how about this I've got considered effort to show him what I'd like to do with the logo the typography how I want to balance texture and photography um how I'd like to take some of this Photograph by the way is is one of his actual photographs so there was that shape print texture color all of those things really really important for your creative Direction I'll then do a comparison so the last sort of second last page of the presentation is always a con comparison

41:12of all of the concepts side by side so that they can really see the contrast and they can really solidify on a direction that works for them and of course I'll just say thank you and I think the next most important thing is to remember that if you're shy and you don't like presenting things on a call and you're not very good at it your next best bet is to record a video walkthrough and you can use a platform called Loom to do this and I'm a big fan and we use it a lot here at Flex for our community feedback and reviews so any of

41:46you who are already students will be very familiar with loom but make use of it for presenting client work to your clients if you don't want to sit on a live call if it makes you really nervous then that's fine you can practice talking to a camera talking to your screen and explaining your thinking trust me it will go the more file with your clients and it'll be a much better process for them and a much more holistic experience they'll also be able to hear your tonality and you might sort of be able to explain something to them that they might have totally missed otherwise you've also got to keep in

42:21mind that even though you put all the effort into writing those captions they may not read all of it so presenting it on a call or over a video is a great idea otherwise you can fall back on just a text so if those two ideas really don't work for you that's fine again there's no right or wrong way to do this as a designer but I do highly recommend that you have some sort of conversation at some point with your clients about the creative Direction it is after all a really really important phase of the project all right so with all of that being said

42:59that about wraps up the creative Direction process that I usually follow with all of my clients what will usually happen after this is they'll come back with some feedback and we'll bang around some other ideas and we'll sort of settle on a final mood board which the client will need to then sign off before we can move in to the design phase I then always include that mood board in the style guides right at the end of the process so if you found this helpful please let us know in the comments below if you want to see more branding and creative process content then also please let us

43:33know that's it for me I'll see you in the next one foreign [Music]