Signal / Two routes, not twenty references
Two routes, not twenty references
On the value of presenting the client with a small, considered set of distinct visual directions rather than an exhaustive collage of inspiration.
There is a habit in the industry of opening a brand engagement with a mood board: twenty or thirty pinned references, presented to the client as a way of "narrowing the visual direction together". The argument goes that the client should see the full range of possibilities before any commitment is made. In practice, mood boards do almost the opposite. They overwhelm the client with possibility, force them to react to other people's finished work rather than describe their own intent, and generate a long, opinion-heavy conversation that almost never converges on a usable brief.
The technique we have settled on instead is to present two distinct, fully thought-out visual routes after the first week of strategy work. Each route is a single page — typography sample, colour palette, a hero composition, and three or four supporting components — sized and styled as if it were already shipping. The two routes are deliberately far apart on at least one axis: one might be quiet and the other loud, one might be classical and the other futuristic, one might be optimistic and the other technical. The point is not to give the client a buffet; the point is to make a real choice possible.
What happens in the client meeting after that is reliably different from a mood-board review. The conversation is not "I like this pin and this one and this one"; it is "I see what each of these is trying to do, and the second one is doing what we need". The client engages with the route as a complete proposal, not as a collection of fragments. The decision is faster, the rationale is clearer, and the work after the meeting picks up speed because the brand engagement now has a centre of gravity instead of a cloud of references.
The hidden cost of the mood board is the time it pretends to save. Every fifty-reference review eats two to three hours of designer time before the meeting (to assemble) and another two during it (to discuss), and at the end of all of that the brief is no narrower than when you started. The two-route review eats four to five hours of designer time before the meeting, and the brief at the end of it is, in most cases, locked. The total time is similar; the destination is not. We have not done a mood-board review in two years and we are not going back.