Death to the Doomscrolling Moodboard

As creatives and marketers, we doubtlessly have pools of saved content consisting of endless Behance and Dribbble links, Instagram screenshots, and LinkedIn posts toward which we aspire to build our brands and campaigns. Plunge into these links and you’ll find an even deeper deluge of idyllic mockups depicting rich, grand-scale activations comprised with the lushness of the pitch-perfect color palette, of-the-moment type combinations, wonderfully directed bespoke photography, and just the right amount of copy (we all know how good that typesetting could have been had there been 10 fewer characters).

The moment you surface to the reality of a blank slate at the start of a fresh project, with a single glance at your brand’s color chips, type palette, and generous handful of overused, corporate stock photography, you realize that the confines of your brand, your budget, your platforms, your stakeholders, and any other number parameters are holding your creative vision back from the next portfolio piece, primed to compete with the creative minds behind any one of your stockpiled inspo links.

Is the reality of your brand standards and your company really to blame here? Or is your doomscrolling mood board responsible for hindering the possibilities of your brand?

While it’s okay to recognize there are aspects of a brand that may not be a perfect fit— the color palette is not the most accessible or tonally inappropriate, the typography is a little outdated, the logo is cumbersome, there hasn’t been an investment in bespoke photography in years— there are moments of inflexibility that occur within the confines of each brand, especially when a brand has outgrown its standard or environment with no refresh in sight. Understanding the stake each element in your brand holds within the landscape of its market is a powerful bank of knowledge to have when determining how elements are applied. 

So what elements maintain the continuity and recognition that make your brand attainable and translatable within your target market?

Sometimes we don’t love the answer. The non-negotiable pillar of our visual identity may play against our knowledge of contemporary best practices or contradict the good taste we as creative minds have cultivated over years of our practice, both of which make us effective within our creative and marketing roles (the latter of which has spawned this issue in the first place). 

But, when an element is unable to be adjusted, we can use the tension to your creative benefit, not hindrance. In a game of creative Tetris, accept that this is an element you’re required to build your solution with, not around, and turn toward the 35,000 foot view surrounding that reason as it pertains to your holistic brand strategy. Erase the mental image of the ideal scenario with your desired parameters and embrace the challenge of your brand, ultimately, remembering that your desired parameters and creative freedom will leave you with all the value of a blank page at the end of any project. When the brand is not recognized or when the project unintentionally spurs an identity crisis without proper resolve or tone, the potential success of the project is undermined even if the creative looks undeniably high-end by comparison.

That being said, in-house creative does not and should not live in a bubble.

The parameters of your visual brand can be challenged and molded effectively into place by every aspect of the project. Voicing your moments of creative tension and actively engaging in a cross-functional collaboration, leveraging the diversity of knowledge that exists across marketing— leaning into content and brand– and teams like commercial, product, and operations, while digging into the areas of flexibility within the visual identity allows exploratory applications to be built to suit without depreciating your key elements of brand stake. Only when the brand stakes are recognized and communicated do the glossy mood boards actually open the fluidity of creative direction and help build the sophisticated, mattified project suited to the needs of your business, which is to say that success relies wholly on the outcome, not on creative fanfare.