From Ancient to Digital Mood Boards and AI — ISM.
The power of visual curation to transcend language and culture across time.
If I asked you to think of mood boards, you may think about Pinterest and not Egyptian still-life art. Perhaps not until I made that connection. You might also overlook today’s disruptive AI Image Synthesis Models (ISM) like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, or MidJourney which are arguably an inflexion point in humanity’s distribution of ‘artistic talent’.
How we’ve shifted from cave art to today’s 2D and 3D mood boards and the imminent injection of ISMs is all about our innate need to advance our tools for compelling visual storytelling.
Today, mood boards are used by businesses and individuals alike to communicate ideas and concepts visually. However, the concept of a mood board has been around in a variety of forms for centuries, quietly overlooked as one of the most stable means for visual human communication across time and culture. Mood boards have been used for all of history to transpose humanity’s ideas and visions from one person’s mind to the next regardless of language barriers. The history of mood boards is fascinating. Let’s take a brief look at the history and evolution of mood boards from ancient wall art to 3D and AI experiences to come.
Storytelling through pictures carved on walls is one of the oldest forms of visual communication we know of. Primitive cavemen and Egyptians used wall painting in caves and then on tomb walls to tell stories, record history and visualise the afterlife. For ancient Egyptians in 4000BC, both hieroglyphic art and still-life were used to tell stories visually like a mood board. Often paired with curated shrines they could represent plagues or the narratives of the gods. This system of using imagery and iconography composed in sequences, allowed historic cultures to communicate ideas, traditions, rituals, future ideas and visionary plans without using words. Visual narratives have the power to transcend illiteracy and language, even today.
Fast forward a few thousand years, mood boards were used by artists during the Renaissance as a way to collect images and ideas for their paintings. In the 18th century, mood boards became more formalised with the advent of collage. Collage is defined as ‘the art of assembling disparate elements’ — often paper — into a cohesive whole. This technique was popularized by French artist Georges Braque and German artist Kurt Schwitters. For writers and poets during this period, mood boards were known as “scrapbooks” and were used to collect snippets of text or imagery that could be used in their work. The term “mood board” wasn’t coined until the early 20th century.
A mood board might be defined as a generalised visual representation or evocation of a thing, but it is not the thing itself. For example, a mood board may visually represent a battle in time, but it is not the battle. It may represent the future aesthetic of the mobile smartphone, but it is not the phone itself. Finally, it may represent the mood of a Parisian dining room, but it is not the actual room design.
While mood boards can be used to represent tangible things like a physical product or an opening scene of a film, they can also be used to represent something more ephemeral like a feeling of anger for the purpose of evoking a mood, or an atmosphere of jubilation with the purpose of being a trigger for inspiration during a design process. This means they are an extremely versatile tool for visual communication and can be created with a mix of literal and abstract collections of images, colours, textures, patterns, and objects to achieve the desired result.
The modern mood board is sometimes linked to the architectural designers of the early 20th century such as British architect Sir Herbert Baker. Baker would create physical collages of images, fabrics, and colours that he would refer to when designing buildings. This allowed him to communicate his ideas and visions to clients and other architects in a general sense.
Mood boards are not blueprints or detailed drawings, they are visual prompts representing designs that did not yet exist. During the early 20th Century the mood board was also known as an ‘inspiration board’ for Fashion and Interior Designers and was a collage of images, fabric swatches, colour schemes and other visual elements that are used to convey a mood or style to their clients. It was here that mood boards were first publicly popularized by celebrity designers like French designer Coco Chanel and American interior designer Dorothy Draper.
Mood boards then took on a new meaning with the rise of advertising and design firms. Advertisers began using mood boards as a way to visually communicate ideas and concepts to their clients. Design firms followed suit and mood boards became a staple in the creative process.
Mood boards would become even more popular in the design world around the 1970s. Designers would create physical mood boards by cutting out images from magazines and glueing them onto poster boards.
This was a time-consuming process, but it allowed designers to experiment with different looks and styles. Mood boards became aesthetic compositions and were no longer just functional tools for communicating content. They were designed, composed and curated with considered proportion and aesthetics. Mood boards now needed to look as compelling as the content they were intending to visualise. Or in other words, a successful mood board should be a beautiful composition in itself.
With the advent of digital technology, mood boarding has evolved into a more efficient process. Online mood board tools like Pinterest, Canva, Mattoboard, Miro and recently Shuffles by Pinterest have made it easy for anyone to create visually compelling mood boards. Each solution has its own focus yielding different advantages and limitations. Pinterest is probably the most simple form of mood boarding allowing you to “pin” images into a gridded virtual board. Its simplicity has made it one of the most popular visual bookmarking tools. Pinterest also takes advantage of a networked internet, with some images dynamically linking to the source website. With over 150 million users, it is clear that visual bookmarking and mood boards are still an intrinsic part of human communication and a tool for expression.
Pinterest understands the power of mood boards for visual expression and in 2022 launched Shuffles. Shuffles is an app where users can create visual mood boards using their pins. Shuffles feel more like old-school decoupage meets social scrapbooking. Users are expressing themselves and their interests as visual collage. It is social networking through mood boarding and as a means of self-expression.
Canva, as the name suggests, is less visual bookmarking and more of a blank canvas for graphic design and illustration. Canva is far more dynamic, allowing you to create 2D graphic mood boards from scratch or use templates to achieve a more desirable graphic style easily.
Another tool called Miro is a digital whiteboard application where mood boards are used for brainstorming and planning with colleagues. Miro is less concerned about the meta beauty of the composition, instead, its emphasis is on the output of collaborative and functional storyboarding.
Mattoboard represents a new wave of tools for mood boards and a potential bridge from 2D mood boards to new 3D virtual metaverse experiences. With Mattoboard, you design with 3D objects on a virtual studio table. This third dimension enhances both the output and the experience of using the tool.
A 3D mood board feels far more realistic and intuitive while you design. You can stack objects on top of one another like in real-life, move a light source around to experience the way objects and textures react to light and shadow, or change the angle of the perspective. Mattoboard is most similar to Canva, where the aesthetics of the compositions and the individual’s design process are a core part of the result. However, Mattoboard also includes the collaborative functionality of Miro with the Pinterest-like ability to dynamically link objects and images to the source websites.
Users of modern tools like Miro, Canva and Mattoboard can drag and drop images, colours, and fonts together to create a custom collage online. All these tools are virtual forms of visual curation and mood boarding and represent the shift from 2D to 3D is happening.
From January 2021 the public was introduced to Image Synthesis Models like, OpenAI’s DALL-E, and Stability AI’s open source ISM, Stable Diffusion. These AI tools can generate images from textual descriptions known as ‘prompts’ or ‘inputs’. An example prompt could be; ‘’Art Deco interior living room with the futuristic landscape’’ See some examples here. Or ‘’Art Nouveau buildings made from concrete rebar rods’’ generating the most hypnotic of results like these. Yes, they are completely mesmerizing.
These intelligent auto-correct tools are another leap in mood board evolution. If we recall our earlier definition, mood boards are used as a method of visual evocation or representation of a thing. They tell a visual story of what is in your head to someone else. ISMs, like Moodboards, can be used as an act of creating or even recalling a feeling, memory, or image to the conscious mind. We may soon be looking at an explosion in creative output fueled by AI.
Projects like DALL-e might be used to create mood boards automatically, where our words are not supportive descriptors, they are the inception. The mood board could become a storyboard or a near-perfect visualisation of your words. I picture the Interior Designer or Film Director pitching their visions to a client, “ So imagine this! Picture yourself sitting in a 17th-century grand hotel foyer, staring at a white marble staircase. You notice the first 3 steps have a darker patina and a wonky tread. You think how beautiful it is to see the 400-year-old gentle scaring from the many thousands of visitors that ascended and descended this hallway. The decay represents the hotel’s soul and history. It has seen so many love stories, secrets, joys, business deals and romances. It’s all there in that wobbly stair’’ Then you click ‘render’ and like magic, the image appears on your mobile phone and you share it to Whatsapp. The client replies immediately, ‘’I don’t like marble, make it wood’’. Click. In the project, This House Does Not Exist, an ISM using text-to-image synthesis, generates beautiful and desirable architectural renderings of modern homes and structures.
Perhaps more interestingly your mood boards could become alternative visual prompts for the AI to replace the text inputs. For example, if you wanted to create a mood board for your ideal beach vacation, you could simply describe your desired mood and the ISM would generate a corresponding image, or feed the ISM with your existing mood board and let it generate new inspired creations and variations. Visual prompts feeding into intelligent AI renderers could train the AI to understand the more idiosyncratic and individual human expressions. Images, after all, can say a lot more than words. With 3D object and material mood boarding becoming accessible and easy to use across devices, users do not need to have any 3D experience to interact with 3D objects and materials. Mood boards like this, where you can connect real products with PBR (Physics Based Rendering) material data embedded, when combined with a model of your own home, could be used as a visual prompt to fully re-create your vision in situ. All you need then is a ‘Checkout’ button.
In the context of mood boards, the possibilities here for industries like visual merchandising, fashion design, event design, and stage and set design are explosive. These tools for auto-generating content will make more and better designers out of all of us. We will become better visual communicators, create better mood boards, and tell more compelling visual stories.
Today, you can now find mood boards on almost any topic imaginable, making them a valuable tool for both personal and professional use. Whether as a business or a designer, mood boards can also be used as a tool for self-expression and creativity. Mood boards have come a long way since their humble beginnings in Ancient Egypt. Thanks to advances in technology, they are now more accessible and easy to use than ever before and with the help of AI, mood boards are evolving once again.
By
