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5 Steps for Making a Wedding Mood Board

February 15, 2023 | kailey

Image by Simply Finn.

After soaking up the newness of being engaged and celebrating with an epic engagement party, it’s time for the wedding planning to commence. And while every wedding planning timeline will be a little different, we always recommend starting with a mood board. This is the key to creating a day that’s undeniably you. 

As you start to form a vision of your wedding day, a wedding mood board can help guide decisions and visually explain your desires to your wedding team. But where exactly should you start? Here’s a simple, five-step process to create a mood board that captures the essence of your personality, style, and wedding dreams. 

What is a Wedding Mood Board?

A wedding mood board is a carefully curated collection of photos that convey the look and feel you hope to create through your wedding design. It can be designed on platforms like Pinterest, Photoshop, Canva–or a combination of the three. We’ve already created a template for you on Canva, but we’ll get to that shortly.

What are The Benefits of Having a Mood Board?

A mood board is essential when hiring and meeting with your wedding vendors. It’ll set you and your vendors up for success from the start since verbally expressing your wedding vision can sometimes be difficult. Having a compilation of photos that visually represents your desired look leaves little room for miscommunication.

Steps For Making a Wedding Mood Board 

Step 1. Discuss Wedding Dreams With Your Partner

Before you grab your laptop and type “Pinterest” in the search bar, do a little offline work with your partner. If there’s one piece of advice we want to ring true, it’s to really explore your relationship and who you are as a couple. Set a date night to discuss your vision and non-negotiables—have a pen and paper handy to jot them down as you dream of your day.  

Need help kickstarting the creative wedding planning processes with your partner? Here are some questions to answer together before creating a wedding mood board:

  • What do we enjoy doing together as a couple? Are we laid-back, or do we enjoy being the life of the party—or both?
  • Where has been our favorite vacation, date, or place to spend time together? How did that location make us feel?
  • What season makes sense for our wedding? Does the season impact the mood of the day?
  • What type of wedding do we not want? What are things that don’t feel like us?
  • Come up with a list of words to describe your wedding vibe–like intimate, adventurous, carefree, nostalgic, silly, cheerful, cozy, laid-back, romantic, wild, vivacious, and warm 

Image by Tiquicia Shot.

Step 2. Start Exploring Your Unique Style on Pinterest

Creating your mood board is not a time to worry about your budget—we’ll worry about that later. This is your chance to put all your ideas on a page, no matter how difficult it may seem to pull off at the beginning. The best place to start? Pinterest. Not only will it give you access to hundreds of wedding inspiration photos, but it’s also an excellent tool for organizing the inspo you find. 

Kerry Charlotte of Haute Wedding explained the benefits of having a Pinterest board and a separate, curated wedding mood board. She said, “The contrast between a mood board and a Pinterest board is that a mood board can be more specific to show a real snapshot of your wedding. Pinterest can show a larger array of your tastes and style preference. Wedding vendors love seeing a full array of your tastes to start designing. This way, we can pull in little details that really make the day custom to you!”

Ready to get searching on Pinterest? Narrow your wedding search with these points:

  • What type of home decor do we gravitate toward? Search for design inspiration from homes and bedrooms–spaces that feel like somewhere you’d enjoy spending time in
  • Pin clothes, accessories, fashion blogger outfits, etc. These will help explain your style and can be translated into the wedding design 
  • Search different typography on Pinterest. What elements of design are you drawn to? Do you like big, bold fonts or more classic elements?

Step 3. Choose 10 Images to Place on Your Wedding Mood Board 

Now that you’ve formed a vision with your partner and started to collect inspiration from Pinterest, it’s time to start refining your collection. Start by selecting the top photos that catch your eye and continuously narrow it down until you have just ten photos. These can be images from Pinterest, Instagram, or even your phone’s photo library. 

Now for the fun part, creating your mood board. To make things easy for you, we’ve created these Canva Templates for you to drop your photos into. After reading these tips, you’ll have a professional-looking mood board in no time: 

  • Sign up for Canva (it’s free!)
  • Click the link above and choose “Use Template”
  • Upload your images into Canva
  • Drag images from the Upload folder to the photo frame squares (it should auto-fill the frame with your image)

Step 4. Pull Colors From Your Favorite Photos

Once you have your favorite images beautifully organized in your Canva wedding mood board, take note of the colors that are used repeatedly. Then, fill the remaining boxes on the Canva template with those colors to bring the design full circle.

These colors will become your wedding color palette, influencing your floral arrangements, fabric textures, invitation design, and more. They might even make the perfect mismatched bridesmaid dress color palette!

Step 5. Take Your Wedding Mood Board Off the Screen

After you’ve finished your mood board masterpiece, print out the design and add it to your wedding planning binder. We also recommend keeping the link handy, so you can make any changes throughout the planning process and can easily send it to your wedding vendors

With a mood board in hand, it’s time to hunt down those wedding pros that can bring your vision to life. Start by reading through our guide, packed with everything you need to know about hiring your wedding vendors. Then, check out some of our favorites in our directory of top wedding vendors around the world.

Image by Lauren Finch Photography. See more of this inspiration here.

 

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11 Comments

  1. Hi there! Love your website. I am a blogger/photographer and was hoping to feature you in one of my blog posts about the importance of mood boarding. I’d like to use some of your mood boards you have on Pinterest. I would be happy to link back to your page. Please let me know if this is okay with you.

    Thanks!

    Alexa

    • Hi Alexa,

      Thanks for asking! Please credit both Junebug Weddings and the photographers whose images are used in the mood boards.

      xo Nicole

  2. Love all of these colours pallets, cannot wait to share this with my couples in Canada.

  3. Loveeeee all of these, thanks for sharing.

  4. Great advice, it’s so important a couple channels themselves into the design of their wedding. Love the mood board examples!

  5. Simply amazing, great utilization of resources.

  6. I really enjoyed the article. You make it more interesting. Thanks!!

  7. Hi there
    I am a wedding planner in Australia who is just starting out. I was hoping to post a link of your mood boards blog and use some of your mood boards that you on Pinterest on my Facebook page and Instagram account and link them back to you. Hope this is okay.

    Thanks

    Ruth

    • Hi Ruth, that’s absolutely okay with us! Please feel free to share and link back to us, we’re excited to help.

  8. i wish i get to have a very simple yet memorable wedding day, i dont need all those fancy stuff.

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