About Mood Boards and the Composition Classroom

About Mood Boards

Mood boards, a mode borrowed from design studies, are visual compositions typically created by designers. They can serve as inspiration for the creation of a new product, and they can also facilitate communication between designers or between designers and clients (McDonagh and Denton 37).

from Apartment Therapy

Eckert and Stacey explain that mood boards

constitute descriptions of the overall aesthetic impression the items in a category should create. This can include colours, proportions, cultural connotations, and so on. Mood boards are often arranged around one central image which encapsulates the essence of that mood, with others that indicate the scope for interpretations. Some images are included purely for their visual properties, others for their cultural properties. (529)

They can be used to highlight absence as well as presence, given that they “serve to indicate a range of possibilities; their power is perhaps best understood by seeing what they exclude” (Eckert and Stacey 530). Mood boards also resist linear narrative, since “all the information is shown concurrently, in contrast to the sequential nature of verbal descriptions” (Eckert and Stacey 530).

A few images of mood boards as used in design studies are included below. (All images from McDonagh and Denton.)

Mood Boards and the Composition Classroom

Our purpose in using mood boards in the composition classroom is to draw on students' resources in thinking and communicating visually as well as verbally. Other posts will detail several approaches to using mood boards across the writing process, from invention to delivery. 

Students in the composition classroom can create mood boards either be done with physical materials (similar to a collage) or electronically. (Pinterest, which calls itself an “online pinboard,” is one platform that allows users to collect images from around the internet and combine them into compositions. An app for the iPad, Moodboard, can also be used to create digital moodboards.)

Although we're treating mood boards primarily as a means to an end - a way to facilitate communication about writing - they are still a technology with which students will have varying levels of skill. So it won’t be enough to simply show students a mood board or two, then send them off to make their own; instructors using mood boards will want to explicitly teach and revisit the techniques of creating mood boards. These class discussions and lessons will support students' development of critical analysis in visual composition.