Mood Boards In Office Design & Fit-Out: What, Why & How?

Mood boards are a powerful tool for helping to inspire, imagine and guide any modern interior fit-out project.
Mood boards are a powerful tool for helping to inspire, imagine and guide any modern interior fit-out project.
M
ood boards are a powerful tool for helping to inspire, imagine and guide any modern interior fit-out project.

In fact, in your quest for the perfect office design, we'd go as far as to say mood boards are crucial. After all, what better way to achieve a fit-out that everyone loves than to have the ability to visualise the end result?

As well as creating time and cost savings, mood boards facilitate experimentation and creativity. They invite you to step outside your comfort zone, entertaining ideas you may not have been sure about, as well as helping to refine what you thought you were certain about.
The feedback that mood boards generate is invaluable for any innovative, modern fit-out. This is precisely why we use them to full effect at RUBENIUS — we don't settle for anything less than the best.

What is a mood board?

Sometimes known as an idea board, a mood board visualises ideas, concepts, and styles for an interior design project. Inspirations within a mood board are usually gathered loosely, acting as a platform that summarises the general creative direction of a fit-out project. Mood boards are crucial for interior designers during the planning stages of a project.

Mood boards convey many aspects of an interior fit-out design scheme: the colour palettes, overall aesthetics, ambience, mood, tone, style, finishes, pattern and texture. In a nutshell, the entire look, feel and atmosphere of a room.
They often take the form of collages of images, materials and fabrics, helping to communicate ideas for a design. Mood boards allow the client to see their brand and identity come to life in their future place of work.

“Mood boards allow us to take project planning to the next level. As well as helping to nail down a design vision, they invite us to get daring and creative.”

How do we use mood boards at Rubenius?

Every interior design starts as a mood board. They represent ideas and inspirations taken from an initial discovery workshop with you, the client.
During the planning phase of any fit-out, we offer our clients the use of digital and physical mood boards. It’s not a case of using one or the other — both complement each other, serving different (yet equally important) purposes.

Digital mood boards allow you to evaluate and provide feedback on a design idea when multiple people are involved in the project; feedback is instant, whether you like or dislike a certain vision or aesthetic.

Physical mood boards allow you to sample patterns, textures, materials and fabric in person. Naturally, this invites more qualitative feedback and open discussion.

Why are mood boards so useful?

Mood boards allow us to take project planning to the next level. As well as helping to nail down a design vision, they invite us to get daring and creative. Not only this, but mood boards help to get buy-in from other team members, eliminating costly mistakes when it actually comes to rolling out your project!

Mood boards allow you to get creative and experimental

Although they are a ‘safe zone', mood boards challenge you to step out of your comfort zone. It's through experimenting with designs and ideas that you're able to get the very best end result — and this is precisely what mood boards facilitate!

Mood boards are fun. They represent an invitation to get as wild and creative as you jolly well please, enabling you to clarify and evaluate all those design ideas you have. They allow you to pull everything together to see how it works in tandem. Do you like what you see and feel? If not, let's consider a few design changes.

Mood boards perfectly tie together two principles of the RUBENIUS DNA — creativity and collaboration.


Mood boards save you time and money

Mood boards allow us to make tweaks and changes before a single paint brush stroke has been made, before a single light bulb has been screwed in, and before a single square metre of carpet has been laid.

For clients who may be potentially unsure of the design or style that they have in mind — perhaps they're weighing up two colour palettes for that new breakout room — mood boards can save the day, creating a process of elimination.
Minimising toing and froing once the fit-out has officially commenced allows project lead times to be kept as short as possible and cost-effective, avoiding mid-project changes.

Mood boards are a tool for helping the fit-out experts, as well as the client, understand exactly what is required and what they really like.


Mood boards invite feedback and buy-in from everyone

Mood boards facilitate evaluation and discussion of various design concepts amongst those who'll be using the office. We all know how important project buy-in is; it helps those using the workspace to feel connected to it — that's it's also theirs.

They also strengthen the communication between us, the design experts, and you, the client. Through carefully structured, probing discovery sessions, we'll gain an intricate understanding of what it is you're after. Mood boards help us to visualise your brief — a crucial starting point for knowing what sort of styles, trends and designs appeal to you and your team.

Mood boards help every stakeholder in an interior design project to thrash out their ideas and feel that they're truly part of a project.

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