Creating A Wedding Mood Board: A Guide To Your Dream Wedding

A wedding mood board is a collection of images, colours, textures, and fonts that represent the desired look and feel of your wedding. It is a useful tool for couples to visualise their wedding and communicate their vision to vendors. Creating a mood board typically involves brainstorming a theme, choosing a format (physical or digital), collecting visual elements, and arranging them in a way that reflects your desired aesthetic. This process helps to establish a clear direction for planning and ensures that all the individual components of your wedding come together cohesively.

Brainstorm and establish a clear theme

The first step in creating a wedding mood board is deciding on a clear theme. This will help you and your wedding planner to establish a clear direction for planning, making it much easier to decide on flowers, dresses, decor, etc.

Begin by writing down keywords or phrases that describe the feel of your wedding. For example, boho chic, southern charm, or modern and industrial. Think about the materials you envision, like wood, lace, brick, or velvet. What about colours and fonts?

You can also ask yourself some questions to help establish a theme: What do we enjoy doing together as a couple? Are we laid-back, or do we enjoy being the life of the party—or both? Where has been our favourite vacation, date, or place to spend time together? How did that location make us feel? What season makes sense for our wedding? Does the season impact the mood of the day? What type of wedding do we not want? What are things that don’t feel like us?

Come up with a list of words to describe your wedding vibe. For example, intimate, adventurous, carefree, nostalgic, silly, cheerful, cozy, laid-back, romantic, wild, vivacious, and warm.

Now you have a list of keywords and phrases, you can start to search for images that convey these feelings. Pinterest, Unsplash and Pexels are great sources to easily find hundreds of artistic and inspiring pictures. Look for visuals that resonate and fit the mood. This could include venues, designs, objects, flowers, and/or attire. If images have people in them, consider the expressions on their faces.

Once you have a collection of images, you can start to look for trends. Do you find yourself pinning lots of a certain colour scheme? Is everything pinned ultra-modern or does it have a very rustic aesthetic? Are you repetitively pinning the same flower, industrial venues, or designs with lots of draping?

Now you have a clear theme, you can start to create your mood board!

Choose your format

Wedding mood boards can be presented either electronically or physically, depending on your preference. Traditional mood boards involve cutting out images and gluing or taping them to a foam board, or pinning them to a bulletin board. Spray adhesive can also be used for this. A more contemporary approach is to create a digital mood board using sites like Canva, PicMonkey, Adobe Spark, and Milanote, which offer templates and make it easy to download and upload images.

If you opt for a physical mood board, you can paint the foam board a colour that expresses your theme. For example, if your wedding has a modern vibe, you might choose a digital format to match.

To create a tangible mood board, you can use a tri-fold board or a cork bulletin board, which can be easily reused. You can cut out images from bridal magazines or print them out after finding them online. Divide your board into sections to play with different colour schemes or themes, and then pin your images, colour swatches, and ribbons or fabrics to the board.

Digital mood boards can be created using Pinterest and a design program such as Canva. Start by creating a Pinterest board with everything that inspires your wedding dreams. When you find an image you love, download it and then drop it into your digital mood board. Once you have enough images, rearrange, resize, and organise them to your liking.

Collect visual elements

Now for the fun part! Start collecting visual elements for your wedding mood board. Search the web or flip through magazines to find images. Pinterest, Unsplash, and Pexels are great sources to easily find hundreds of artistic and inspiring pictures. Look for visuals that resonate and fit the mood. This could include venues, designs, objects, flowers, and/or attire. If you are creating a physical mood board, you can also cut out images from magazines. If you are creating a digital mood board, consider adding some movement with gifs or videos (visit Giphy or YouTube).

Collect textured elements that can’t be appreciated onscreen—a restaurant’s matchbook or silk ribbon from gift-wrapping. If images have people in them, consider what expression they should have.

Don't limit yourself to just wedding images. Think about what inspires you! You might find inspiration in nature, fashion, architecture, and interior design.

Once you have a good amount of images, filter through them and choose the ones that best align with your vision. Pick a variety of photos, not just photos with flowers or all photos of wedding attire.

Gather colours and fonts

When it comes to gathering colours and fonts for your wedding mood board, there are a few approaches you can take.

First, you can pull colours from your favourite photos. Take note of the colours that are used repeatedly in your selected images and use them as your wedding colour palette. These colours can influence your floral arrangements, fabric textures, invitation design, and more.

If you don't have a colour palette in mind, you can try pulling colours that are common throughout the pictures you chose for your mood board. Adobe Colour offers a wide range of palettes to choose from and can even help you put together your own custom palette. You can also use colour swatches to help tie your vision together.

When it comes to fonts, you should choose one or two that align with your wedding theme and the overall look and feel you want to convey. For example, are you going for something formal, vintage, rustic, or modern? You can find endless options for downloadable fonts on websites like Dafont, ranging from "handwritten" to "old school".

Don't be afraid to get creative and experiment with different colours and fonts until you find the perfect combination that captures the essence of your personality, style, and wedding dreams.

Arrange the pieces

Now that you've gathered all your pieces, it's time to put them together. If you're making a physical mood board, cut out your images, colour swatches, and any other elements you've chosen. Play around with the layout until you're happy with how it looks, then glue or pin your pieces down. If you're making a digital mood board, upload your images and other elements to your chosen platform, then arrange and rearrange them until you're happy with how it looks.

There's no right or wrong way to arrange the pieces on your collage. However, using pieces of varying sizes will help create that signature collage look. Make the images that convey your wedding mood the most a little bigger than the others. You can also play around with the colours and fonts you include to enhance your desired vibe. For example, you might paint your physical board a colour that expresses your theme, or choose a digital format that matches your modern aesthetic.

If you're creating a physical board, you might want to divide it into sections to play with different colour schemes or themes. You can also add ribbons, fabrics, and other textured elements to your physical board to add a tactile element.

Remember, your mood board doesn't have to be perfect from the start. It's a "living" board that can change and evolve as your wedding plans develop.

Frequently asked questions