It is difficult to gauge the success of a website design. Unlike a development process, which either meets the provided requirements or doesn’t, design’s only guidance is often to “create a modern, clean look and feel.” That’s why it’s important to have a design kickoff session with your client to make sure everyone is on the same page. When working with a bigger group of stakeholders, we find the moodboard process invaluable.

Here are 5 tips to make your moodboard the best it can be:

1. Gather existing materials.
Style guides, logos, colors, typefaces, print materials. Anything the organization has already created that will guide the design is key. Most organizations already have some sort of design language that will dictate your work to at least a small extent. Sometimes a client will be looking to you for a completely fresh start, which is nice, but it’s important to show them their existing materials to see why they want to go away from them!

2. Get the right people in the room.
Moodboards are great to get your creative grounding, but only if the right people are present. If you don’t include someone from marketing who is working with another agency to rebuild the company brand, then the session will be pretty worthless.  As a rule of thumb, have the people in the room that can stop the project because they don’t like the direction it’s going. There is nothing more painful than to carefully craft a complete design language to only have to go back to square one when the corporate color has been changed from royal blue to navy blue!

3. Include relevant examples.
Examples from other sites are critical in the creation of a moodboard. It’s important to use examples from sites within the same industry as your client whenever possible.  With that said, it’s also important to not use examples from overly trendy brands and sites. We’ve gone away from using the Apple site just because the fact that it is Apple brings a level of bias into the mix. You want the examples relevant to the type of business your client is doing, but not something that they are judging on merits other than the design.

4. Know your audience.
Moodboards are accepted differently by different crowds. Sometimes groups are highly engaged in them while other times the client seems to have a hard time seeing the value. It’s important to do what you can to get those people engaged in the process.  It’s easy to question the value yourself when interacting with disinterested clients, but don’t give up! If you have problems down the road, it’s important that you can say, “but in the moodboard we decided…”

5. Keep it under an hour.
You really ought to be able to determine what direction the client wants to go within an hour.  If you get an involved group, it can be easy to go over 60 minutes, but typically the conversation will degrade to rehashing what was said previously. Of course, the precursor to this is having the appropriate number of slides in your presentation so as to not encourage an extra long meeting!

It you follow these tips, a big roadblock on the path to design success is taken care of, assuming you take good notes on the great feedback you’ll be receiving!

Written by Matt Moore