How to Create a great Inspiration Board

Inspiration boards are the foundation for each and every Cheshire Cat Creative design project. Before we begin creating anything, we always start by pulling inspiration from photos and compiling them into a clean and cohesive inspiration board. This step is fundamental to the creative process, and it has proven to be really effective for helping us come up with original concepts that our clients are really happy with. 

For example, many of our clients ask for a brand that is simple, clean, and classic. All of these characteristics are our forte, but there are literally thousands of colour palettes, font combinations, and brand elements that reflect those key words. An inspiration board gives both the client and us a visual foundation for the brand, it ensures that we’re on the same page (which saves multiple revisions), and it gives us a visual reference for both this and future projects.

Today we’re giving you an inside look at our process for creating an inspiration board. Whether you’re a designer seeking a starting point for an upcoming project or a client who preparing for a rebrand, hopefully you’ll find this info helpful.

1. Create a board on Pinterest

Millions of amazing, styled images are available at your fingertips on Pinterest. Regardless of what you’re looking for you’re bound to find the perfect image on this social media platform. 

Before a project begins, we ask our clients create a secret board and pin images to it that reflect their brand or idea. We ask them to think about tone, style, and colour scheme. In the pin description, we ask them to write a short note on why they chose that particular image. Their description gives us a much better understanding of their preferences.

2. Look for patterns

Once a client has finished their board and their branding project has begun, I go through their Pinterest board and look for patterns between the images.

3. Refinement and moodboards

After we’ve looked for patterns, we begin to save the strongest images that reflect the direction of the brand to a folder. I open a new Adobe Illustrator document and begin to pull the images together in to our own grid, cropping and repositioning photos to create something that visually makes sense…it’s almost like working out a puzzle. It’s time consuming as the images need to fit together to create a cohesive outcome.

4. Client feedback

We simply then forward this on to the client for their feedback. The vast majority of the time we get an immediate approval! This document now forms the basis for every project we do for this client.