— Process
Why we do not make mood boards
A client asked for one recently. We talked her out of it and made tea instead.
Mood boards are quick to make and easy to approve, which is precisely the problem. They allow everyone in the room to agree before anyone has actually decided anything. A client nods at a grid of handsome, unrelated images and believes she has signed off on a direction, when what she has really signed off on is a feeling.
The trouble arrives four months later, when the plaster goes on and it is warmer than the photograph she remembers, or the timber reads redder in her light than it did in someone else's. Nothing has gone wrong. It is simply that a collage cannot carry a decision, and it was never asked to.
What we do instead
We sit in the actual room, at the hour it will actually be used, and talk about what happens there. Where the light lands in March and in July. Which corner nobody ever walks into. Where the bags get put down. The concept comes out of that conversation, and it arrives as one direction rather than three.
Then we leave the samples behind. Not in a folder — propped against the wall they will eventually become, for a fortnight, so the client sees them at seven in the morning and again at nine at night. Most decisions make themselves by the end of the second week.