Present Imperfect

Just not in the mood. | March 27, 2008

Let me preface this by saying that some of my best friends use moodboards.

I just don’t care for them. Moodboards, that is, not my friends.

Moodboards smack of college dorm room walls: wall-size visual identity crises. “Who am I? Why am I here? What shoes best describe my personality?” All reasonable questions when you’re 17 and have listed your major as “undeclared.” But in a professional context, they appear, to me anyway, as an act of desperation. They are often futile exercises in finding a point of view — by having absolutely no point of view whatsoever.

And I think that’s insulting to us as creative professionals.

Why? Because every creative person has a point of view. Every audience has a point of view. Every client has a point of view. And if you don’t know what all of those are before you start tacking random scraps of magazinery to a piece of foam core, you’ve got much bigger problems than finding an X-Acto knife with which to mutilate last month’s issue of I.D.

Also, by their very nature, moodboards are derivative. It may be true that there are no new ideas. But do we have to be so blatant about it? How can looking at someone else’s interpretation of the soul of a sports car possibly inspire an honest interpretation of the soul of, well, whatever it is we’re trying to find the soul of? I believe that images don’t asexually reproduce from other images. That words don’t grow like mold atop other, older words. I believe creative inspiration is more intangible than that.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t all gleefully do our homework. Reading, watching films, listening to music, taking pictures. These are things we do because we need to. We crave creative stimulus. We hunger for art. And as we feed that hunger, we also feed our individual artistic sensibilities. In other words, we find our point of view. From there, it’s just a matter of putting pen to sketch pad or keyboard to cursor. We’re still exploring new territory, but we’re exploring it with a map, some trail mix, and one of those flannel-covered canteens of cool mountain spring water.

Moodboards are Paris in Las Vegas. They are a bad cover version of your favorite song. They are carob chip cookies. They are pale imitations of true inspiration.

I prefer the real thing.