A moodboard is a super tangible collage made of pictorial and textual elements expressing an overarching idea, theme, or aesthetic style. It can be purely pictorial or a hybridized text-image artifact, where the image is permitted to overshadow the need for explicit textual indications. It also serves different purposes throughout the creative process. All possible rules of aesthetics, size and format should be governed by moods, or users’ perceptions of feeling that the designer wants to provoke.
The recent rise of Artificial Intelligence, through visual search engines, non-destructive image and text editing, and generative systems enable the development of novel specialized tools for aspects of moodboard creation. Through image generation, automatic layout, or Generation followed by Manual curation, tools can alleviate the cognitive overhead of moodboard synthesis. MoodBoard Generators or MBGs are tools that authenticate user design concepts with pre-designed visually unique collections of elements explored and tasted from a library of design inspirations.
Overview of Moodboard Generators
Key Features
This tool is convenient to work with, thanks to the intuitive user interface and easy user experience. While minimalist in approach, it presents a user with large preview areas for effective moodboard creation. Similar to other Adobe products, The moodboard generator tool, offers a vertical left-side toolbar for option selection. The menu has icons for different operations, including searching for templates, access to design components, storing UI assets, working on clients, using different themes for the design, the text option such as adding heading, subheading, and body text, images, logos, and much more. The right-side preview area shows previews for the currently selected design. In the top menu, the added elements via the left-side toolbar can be saved, the undo and redo operations can be performed, a virtual size for the moodboard can be opted for, and any element or active component can be deleted or its color can be modified. For design correction and betterment, the top menu also allows adding effects and replacing the selected design component or elements.
The moodboard generator is free to use, it includes free classes, fonts, and integration. Paid plans start with a monthly fee that grants users access to premium templates, integration, and easy social media post scheduling and resizing. The tool is not limited to mood boards but can also create a wide variety of other graphics like posters and presentations. It has a clean and uncomplicated interface with clear visual directions. The workspace provides easy access to all features through organized tool sections.
Users can upload elements from their devices or integration, it allows the combination of multiple assets into a single one for easy integration into a mood board. Other customization features include an option to resize or reshape the board and adjust the opacity of added elements.
Even with the left-side UI element which appears quite cumbersome because of its length, one operates the moodboard design swiftly. It is easy to learn and use this implement for moodboard creation purposes. A user can see UI prompts explaining how to perform operations on particular design elements and components. Even more complex operations such as modifying text magnificently are made easy with suggestions provided on hover on certain UI buttons or options.
Customizable templates
The moodboard tool provides a wide variety of customizable templates. Moodboard templates contain pre-defined blocks and grids where moodboard elements are arranged. Users can search for a moodboard template based on the most common moodboard categories, and users can filter the search by the preferred layout of the moodboard. By default, it provides 24 moodboard templates that are categorized into four categories. In addition, users can search for general graphic design templates, and use them as a moodboard, and there are thousands of templates for moodboard use. From the top 50 general templates, four templates are used for moodboard generation.
This utility allows visual editing of the layout of a moodboard. Users can remove pre-defined blocks, and swap the position and size of blocks. There is no limit to the number of moodboard elements that can be placed on the moodboard.
Collaboration Features
This feature encourages collaboration among users with templates in their gallery and an open gallery where anyone can view, like, and comment on the templates and projects of others. Collaboration tools also include the ability to create shareable links for others to view and comment or view and edit a project. The Publish and Share tab also allows a project to be shared on specific social media channels if that channel is linked to an account along with the ability to download or print projects. A variety of projects can be created and shared including moodboards, logos, social posts, landing pages, videos, marketing materials, and more. With all projects, it is easy to navigate to different pages, delete pages, and rename pages.
Integration with Other Tools
Before the launch of Adobe Express, the web-based software to create simplified graphic design for quickly creating social media posts using templates, tools like Canva ruled the market. Adobe’s foray was an answer to an observation of the increased growth of small and medium businesses, and analyzing their requirements of delayered and simplified tools for marketing collateral design.
With an extensive tool like Photoshop being often considered an overkill by GenZs and millennials, due to their well-catered set of layers and blend modes, filter plugins, typography capabilities used for both digital and print, its catered to these minds by offering an extensive list of pre-loaded templates for quick design creation, with the promise of being easy-to-understand like any other meme breaker mobile app, yet backed with seamless integration and high-quality output of the Adobe software suite.
Besides, it supplies third-party integrations with companies and gets media assets sourced to aid content creation, but it aims to tackle a larger revenue pie by establishing real-time integration with high-powered tools of the Creative Cloud suite – Creative Cloud Libraries, Photoshop, Photoshop Express, as well as Lightroom, along with Adobe Stock, that showcases and allows stock media to content creators for licenses-sharing. Coupled with Premiere Rush for video-editing and audio/visual storytelling, and Spark for maintaining content blogs, Adobe Express aims to be at the core of your content creation, an accelerator to be precise, for your Visual Storytelling.
Comparative Analysis of Leading Tools
Tools differ significantly in a number of ways that should be taken into account before choosing one for the project. We selected and listed below three tools for the category. The listed tools give smooth processes to create a moodboard. This section reviews these selected tools; Moodboard by GoMoodboard and Moodboard by Shutterfly, Moodboard by BreezyAVM.
User Experience Across Tools
All of the tools required login information prior to access. For the online tools, work was saved automatically, but for the desktop tools, users were prompted to save after each task completion. In the real-world speed testing, time to create a product is paramount, since time is money in design firms. All users were given the same images. The images were not provided by the testers; completion of the task using the provided images was the focus of each tool test. Moodboards were created by each tester as a group exercise. These moodboards were primarily used to bridge the gap between the physical and the digital spaces. Additionally, moodboards were incorporated into presentation documents used during the client presentation, which detailed space planning, lighting, furniture selections, and color palettes.
Because these tools are free, we can’t complain about the limited stock photo and text options too much, but it’s important to know that there aren’t many of them. Sometimes you may find it tricky to browse something appealing, but that’s simply how things work until a better version of the generator is released. Various subscription plans are available to remove the limitations.
The tools differ significantly in the number of accounts – some allow using the tools without registration, others require paying for an account for each computer. Some accounts expire and no warning about it is provided.
Functionality Comparison
Some tools allow images to be imported from social networks, while some others allow the importing from local device only. Image and video license control is supported by two tools only for images. Advanced moodboard editing functions are offered by one tool only. Two tools allow the generated boards to be downloaded in PDF format, while download options of other tools are less diverse. Quality of the generated content is controlled in a different way via allowing or forbidding the importing from social networks (some do not allow imports, while others allow it).
On the other hand, several quality control means are supported by several tools – automatic detection of duplicates is done by two tools, bylaws encryption is supported by one tool, manual approval of imported images is supported by one tool, and smart moodboard cleanup functions are offered by one tool. Due to aforementioned digital rights protection issues related to the collection of design elements from social networks, we urge for a reasonable complexity of the offered functionality-rich digital rights encryption solutions.
Integration Capabilities of Moodboard Tools
In design and design-adjacent fields, moodboards are often incorporated into a project concept that you share with stakeholders. Consider how your moodboard will be presented when deciding on which moodboard generator tool to use. Some tools focus more on making your moodboard visually appealing than the process of creating it. They offer you various templates to choose from in a selection of design styles. If you’re looking for more than just a visual presentation or don’t want to go through the lengthy process of working on a template, some moodboard generator tools focus more on making moodboard creation easier and more functional.
Conclusion.
In conclusion, the rise of moodboard generator tools has shown the importance and popularity of moodboards for various ends and the democratization of their production. Simultaneously, it has also shown a tendency to the generative aspect of those tools, diminishing users’ agency during the creative process of defining an aesthetic direction for a project at the same time that unintentionally replicates aesthetics from mainstream visual culture. Pinpointing the differences, similarities, and possibilities of action of such platforms and their technology choices is vital to inform new users of these tools about their specificities and limitations. However, more importantly, it is essential to practitioners in Web Design to discuss how some choices may affect the possibility of achieving unique and personally relevant results.
As moodboards’ role in the Web Design’s creative process is an aggregation of inspiration and direction definition, the agency that users have to create these boards is essential to the success of their use. While generative and discovery moodboard generators lessen users’ effort to go through all the content present on social media, photography or design portfolio platforms, or search engines, their aim is more geared towards producing a moodboard for the moodboard’s sake. In the case that the moodboard needs to be defined as more than a mere illustration, to create a visual anchor for a given project, tools that allow for more autonomy and authority to select assets and assure the relative uniqueness of the results need to be adopted.
