1950's New York Mood Board

A mood board is a form of poster design, which consists of images that describe or link to a keyword. The concept of mood boards helps graphic designers which is why they usually use them to illustrate a visual atmosphere. However they can also be used to visually explain a certain style of writing or a setting you desire. For each keyword a different color can be used as connotation and by using our creativity and imagination as acknowledge the right colors to use. By doing this we can send out a vibe of our choice for the viewer to feel. Within the images to create a mood board, various props, signs, logos, color grading, weather conditions are taken into careful consideration as a darker grade of a light source can change the whole image spark affect.

I researched which images to use for my 1950’S New York mood board by using different search engines however by doing some previous research I used a variety of keywords to search for more accurate historical detailed images. The search engines that I used were: www.google.com, www.gettyimages.co.uk, www.picsearch.com. However choosing which images to search for were picked out after creating a mindmap, i did this so that I could gather historal visual ideas which fit to set the atmosphere of 1950's New York. My mindmap parted in to four different main contexts, with the contents, included:

Florist Shop

-          Shop sign (Logo, Slogan etc)

-          Shop furniture (Counter, Table etc)

-          Flower

-          Big windows

-          Colourful

-          Big plant (Audry II)

Victorian (1800’s) architecture

-          Decayed woodwork

-          Sash windows

-          Gothic

-          Crumbly

-          Dull lighting

-          Brick work

-          Dull colours

-          Broken down

-          Peeling paint

-          Rusty

Old backstreet

-          Waster on the streets

-          Cobbled street

-          Crumbling pavements

-          Reflections

Neighbourhood

-          Dull colours

-          Working class/poor

-          Over crowded

-          Cramped

-          Boring

By creating my own mood boards I recognized how to select and edit appropriate images. I collected all the images that I thought best linked to the theme I resized the images in order of importance and then laid out the images on A3 paper. Initially I did this so that the main images were more eye catchier and could describe the concept of the theme overall. However I also used a few smaller scaled images to show a bit of detail about 1950’s New York such the shop signs and logos. I think the format of the mood board works really well as it is clearly able to describe the theme, 1950’s New York.