Great online tool to create a mood board

Creating a mood board is a great way to visualise, develop and communicate design concepts. It can be a useful frame of reference for interface/website design, storyboarding, brand design, fashion design – in short any kind of creative endeavour, including those that aren’t explicitly visual. The idea is to collect images and objects that encapsulate a “feeling” or direction that reflects what the designer is trying to achieve.

A great online tool for creating moodboards is provided by Image Spark. A free account gets you 1GB of space to create up to 2 mood boards. Creating a library of images is made easy with the plug-in (Firefox). You can also upload your own images, or browse the libraries of others in the “community” to collect images. Then just arrange your images into a mood board using the simple, intuitive interface. The tagging facility opens up the community content so that you can see interesting collections of similar images uploaded by everyone.

It’s unclear whether future upgrades will involve a cost or not. The site’s success will depend ultimately on whether the community takes off. The simple interface is a step in the right direction, although if I have a gripe, only plug-ins for Firefox are available at the moment. The site can also be pretty slow. Having said that, it’s free, useful and compelling!