How to find your brand’s ultimate creative direction: my method + 2 mood board examples

Which creative direction should you follow when you can go in a million different directions with your brand? How do you pick one and more importantly - how do you know it is the right one for your brand? A creative direction that will take your brand to the next level visually and emotionally. One that will ultimately be the foundation of your brand’s identity on which the brand will be built for the years to come! So you see how a creative direction has such a crucial role to play in your brand’s success trajectory. Whether you’re rebranding your business or starting a new one, I wrote this article to educate you on a clear and simple way to find your brand’s ultimate creative direction.

I’ll share the exact creative direction process I use in my brand and web design studio along with 2 mood board examples that will help solidify the concept in your mind. Keep reading!

What is creative direction?

Let’s tackle this question as simply as possible. Creative direction is the decision you make regarding the look and feel of your brand. Although in this context, the “feel” most definitely comes before the “look”. Creative direction is a perfect combination of strategy and creativity. A process that unifies your (or a team’s) vision on any kind of decision-making ranging from a simple graphic design to a complete brand overhaul.

Why do you need creative direction for your business?

• To gain clarity of your own brand identity so your marketing efforts become more focused.

• To establish your brand’s overall feel.

• To understand the mindset as well as the vibe of your target audience better.

• To create a strong foundation for your brand’s visual identity including logo design, website design, and graphic design.

A lot of factors come into consideration when crafting a brand’s creative direction and the decision-making process is and should be a strategic one rather than one based on trends and pretty things. Some factors that you should definitely consider when deciding on your brand’s creative direction include:

1. BRAND GOALS

Things that you absolutely want to accomplish with your business in this brand-building journey. Your non-negotiables like offering top-quality services, being approachable, and charging premium prices. 

2. TARGET AUDIENCE

A set of people who will benefit from your services. What are they like, their age and demographics, what are their likes and preferences, and what values do they portray and prioritize in their life? Every detail that you can obtain, will massively help you craft that really tailored creative direction for your brand so that your business ends up catering to the exact needs of the exact kind of people that your services are for.

3. YOUR ONLINESS

Your superpower plays a huge role in your brand’s creative direction as well as brand-building if you see it from a big-picture perspective. Something that makes you different from others. It could be your personality, your approach, or an offering that is really different from all others being offered by your competitors.

I am breaking down a quick and easy way to find your superpower in this free training. This will help you find and use your unique magic to stand out in the crowd!

4. VISUAL LANGUAGE

Now comes the fun part! Every graphic designer’s dream! What kind of font styles do you feel align well with your brand? Authoritative and formal Serifs? Clean, modern Sans-serifs? My favorite place to go down the rabbit hole of browsing creative fonts that fit well with the creative direction I’m going for is - You Work For Them. 

If you’ve done your due diligence with the above points, you will naturally gravitate towards a particular kind of stylish but timeless font style over the others. Shortlist those but do not worry about finalizing one yet, we’ll get to that later.

The same goes for colors. Colors can be tricky to choose but I’ve made your work easier by putting together a list of 10 aesthetic color palettes for your professional brand. You can choose one that you like from here, or tweak it to make your own! If want to understand the psychology behind each color and how you should choose colors for your brand and website, head over to this article by Hubspot. Finalize the color palette for your brand that includes 5 colors: primary color, secondary color, light neutral, dark neutral, and accent color.

Everything mentioned above combined with the visual language gives a brand a solid creative direction to follow. If you work through all the aspects intentionally, you can expect to land on a creative direction for your brand that you feel really good about as you move forward in your brand-building journey.

Working on this creative direction process can oftentimes be overwhelming especially when you have to play the role of a brand strategist and graphic designer on your business while doing the duties of an entrepreneur inside your business. I’ve got your back as I offer a quick turnaround strategy workshop to help you with all of the above things leaving you feeling utterly confident with your brand positioning and creative direction. Schedule a free discovery call here.

Now that you have all the necessary ingredients in place, let’s go ahead and put them together and translate them into a creative direction with the help of a mood board. This part always gets the graphic designer inside me so psyched!

My method to craft a creative direction

I begin working on a visual creative direction by drawing out a grid of 9 blocks. You can even go for more. Up to 12 blocks also work great. I use Adobe Illustrator but you can use any free tool like Canva that has free pre-made templates for you to put together your mood board. Once we populate these blocks in the mood board - as the name suggests, we will be setting the mood for the brand. The feel of it and a guide for how the visual side of the brand will play out. Once finalized, this mood board will be your brand’s ultimate creative direction.

Based on all the strategy work we did in the beginning, I like to pull a set of creative considerations and write them down as keywords parallel to the grid so that I always remember to choose images for the mood board that resonate with the already established creative considerations.

And now we populate the mood board with images! Feel free to pull images from Google, Pinterest, Behance, etc. Take a look at these mood board examples to see my method of choosing images that together work to create a creative direction.

Mood board example #1: Creative direction for the brand and website design of a real estate consultant

As established earlier, the mood board is a visual guide that depicts the creative direction of your brand. Each element in the mood board should embody a part of your brand so be very intentional with it even if it takes some time and multiple rounds of iteration. Be patient with this step!

For this mood board, I first looked for and pulled into one block, an image of a person who fits well with my ideal client profile. This makes your creative direction process more focused because you can visualize and think from the perspective of your audience.

Next, I bring in a few font styles that I shortlisted. And looking at the ideal client image, and the overall brand vibe - I’ll follow my gut feeling and select a font that I’ll use across the brand identity design and website design moving forward. Remember you also shortlisted some font styles? Time to bring them in here to make a final selection.

Time to add some images with the colors from your brand's color palette (you don’t need images with the exact color codes, even close will do). Again, you’ll realize what colors work well and don’t work with the brand’s feel. Tweak the colors that don't belong. After all, this creative direction process is a creative and flexible one!

Finally, grab and plug in some images that depict the visual style you want to go for. Strong and bold? Flowy and feminine? Simple with a lot of whitespaces? A lot of graphic elements? Also, depending upon if you’re DIYing your brand logo or working with a professional brand designer, you might want to include an image/s of the brand logos you like to complete your creative direction.

For my mood board example above, I chose a stronger and bold feel with a ton of whitespace that resonates with my client’s premium services.

And with that finalized creative direction working as a guide, I went ahead and built a custom brand identity and website design for this client. 

Mood board example #2: Creative direction for the brand and website design of a luxury interior designer

Following the same process as always, I put together this mood board while constantly referencing the creative considerations I had already established. For the custom brand and website design for this client, yet again the creative direction served as a north star and we ended up building a brand that feels exactly as we envisioned it to be.

conclusion

So there you have it. Whether you’re rebranding your business after years of hanging in with an inconsistent brand or just starting out and looking for inspiration to set the right tone for your brand from the get go - my proven method of finding your ultimate creative direction will surely help you! But if you still find yourself confused with the process and need some extra hand-holding as you build your brand, I invite you to book a free discovery call with me where we can chat all about it and then some :)

Building brands with strategy + love,

Ridha