A Great Tool for Creating Mood Boards – sampleboard.com

In a number of other posts I have discussed mood boards, concept boards, storyboards, journey boards, etc.  In most of those posts I mentioned PowerPoint and similar graphics programs as excellent tools for creating them.  Last year I became aware on an extremely good online tool that addresses the needs of many different design professionals, sampleboard.com (www.sampleboard.com).First, in addition to creating boards for landscape designers, sampleboard.com can be used by interior designers, graphics and web designers, fashion designers, and wedding planners.  Second, you can use it for free without registering.  By registering though, you are able to save and share your boards.  There are also paid plans with additional features.

To begin, you select your paper size.  Unfortunately, no standard US sizes are available.  Then you pick the type of board you want to create such as landscape design.  On the right of the screen are a number of filters that allow you to pick from the sampleboard.com gallery of images.  Categories include hardscape, softscape, garden decor, and others.  Within these categories are types.  Hardscape types would obviously be different from softscape types.  Below that there are additional filters for Type, Style, and Supplier.  Once you set the filters there are one or more windows of choices for you to review.  Placing your mouse pointer over the thumbnail image choice brings up a larger preview display.  When you find an image that is appropriate for the board you are creating, you simply drag it to the design board.

Once it is on the design board you can size and position it.  As you add components to your board you can switch from category to another.  You might add Hardscape design elements and then move on to Softscape and Garden Decor.

Sampleboard.com also has very good layout, drawing, and editing tools.  You can use the Magic Eraser to pull the background out of an image.  You can move objects forward and backward to layer them.  There are other Photoshop-like tools that you can use to modify the various images you add to your board.  Also, there are tools for adding shapes and text to your board and you can color these as you see fit.  Another plus is you can paste images from other sources.

The graphic below is a sample mood board created on sampleboard.com.

Sample Mood Board Created in SampleBoard

If you would like to see more samples check this post in the sampleboard.com blog, Garden Ideas – Select your Garden Theme or Garden Style.

Sampleboard.com is very useful.  It has a lot of very powerful capabilities built into it.  I find that fact that it is online to be very useful.  If I am working in the field on a tablet computer I can access sampleboard.com and compile ideas.  I don’t need any other software to get started.  Also, any pictures I take with the table can be pasted directly onto by board as part of the ideation process.  I also find it is useful for marking up site pictures for a site analysis.

I suggest checking out sampleboard.com and bookmarking it for future use.