Using Content Mood Boards to Visualize Your Content Recommendations (2024)

Most content strategists are word nerds. We find joy in taking lengthy, complex language and editing, writing, editing, and rewriting it until it’s useful and usable for our audience.

Some content strategists may even enjoy spending Friday nights structuring spreadsheets into content audits. 💃

Content strategists have a gift for guiding content direction, and we’re used to using certain tools to do our work. From content audits to workflow diagrams to governance policies, we have common tools to communicate our strategy recommendations.

Roadblocks can often appear when content strategists are looking to get buy-in for the important content work we’re doing.

• How do you make a 500-row content audit digestible for a busy stakeholder?
• How do you effectively communicate with a stakeholder that prefers visual presentations or has never worked with a content strategist?
• How do you get an entire organization to read your content strategy documentation and successfully change the way it produces content?

While there are many different approaches we can take to solve these questions, creating a content mood board can be one helpful deliverable in communicating content strategy in a visual way.

A mood board is a way to communicate ideas in a visual way. From branding to fashion design, mood boards are great ways to provide a vision for a project.

Most mood boards are collages of photos, colors, font types, textures, and other items. While some mood boards may contain words, words are rarely the focus.

Here are a few examples of mood boards:

You can find many more examples on Dribble or Pinterest.

So, what’s a content mood board? Content mood boards combine the traditional mood board’s visual format with the power of words, research, and empathy to convey content recommendations.

Content mood boards can be used to express recommendations to design team members or get content strategy buy-in from stakeholders.

You could use a content mood board for any product and in any industry. I recently came up with a product idea and will show you how content mood boards can help communicate ideas during product design and development.

I was inspired by this really cool data visualization that shows hip hop artists ranked by the number of unique words used in their lyrics.

It made me wonder: What if an up-and-coming artist saw this same visualization and wanted to use more unique words in their music? What steps would they take? Are there any tools that could aid them in that goal? What could that look like?

The idea for Spitfire was born, at least for this Medium post. It could be an app that mixes in recommended words, similar to Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day, as well as tips for rhyming words, lyric ideas, artist inspiration, and more.

In order to successfully develop a content strategy for a new product, the best place a content strategist can be is part of research and discovery. It is during initial user interviews that you can start to hear trends in the vocabulary users use and understand what kind of content will give them the most value.

I performed some desk research as well as some light generative research with some artists and a producer to help me ideate on what Spitfire could be.

I found that people use “flow” to refer to their lyrics and delivery rather than using “lyrics,” “rhymes,” or “rhyming.”

I also found that “clout” has a negative connotation, but “recognition” was spoken about positively.

As with many content strategy tools, a content mood board can take on many forms, but here are the steps I followed to create mine.

1. Use photos of users or photos that represent them and things they may have discussed in their interviews.
2. Give more visual weight to frequently used words and phrases by making them larger, and make less-used words smaller.
3. Add “quick bite” research findings and user quotes.

These are examples to give you an idea of what a content mood board would look like at scale. I didn’t get to interview 50 people, but hopefully, you see how this would work.

I used Canva to create the content mood boards. It’s a super easy tool for non-visual designers to use. Also, content mood boards don’t have to be digital. You could use printouts, drawings, and sticky notes to make a board, too.

A content mood board doesn’t have to be perfect. Don’t freak out about kerning or white space. Just make sure it can help you communicate your content recommendations.

Using the mood board, I ideated around what types of content would be helpful to users and what language to use in the product. I quickly sketched up some ideas of how I felt content could be organized.

Then, I met with a product designer and presented the mood boards and sketches.

Both of these were great collaboration tools and really helped communicate the importance of my recommendations. Plus, it helped to have an amazingly thoughtful and talented designer to work with. (Thanks, Sam!)

Here’s the mockup we developed:

Features

• Flow Words: The app provides users a new word every day. It also includes rhyming “Flow Words” to help them write their lyrics.
• Popular Artists: We added lyrics from popular artists who used the word of the day to give users inspiration and show them practical use of the word.
• Recordings and Drafts: Some artists prefer to write their lyrics first. Other artists prefer to record their ideas and then write. Some may partner with songwriters to craft their music. To accommodate these different preferences, we added “My Recordings” and “My Drafts” features.
• Free Flow: While artists are drafting up lyrics, we provided an alert that tells them how many unique words are found in their writing. We also included suggestions for words they could use in their flow to help them continue expanding their vocabulary.

When working with copywriters, product designers, UX designers, and other team members, content strategists must help the team stay in alignment when it comes to content. Use content mood boards for:

New products or iterating on a feature

Create content mood boards together as a team to build your collaborative muscle. Be sure to include team members outside the core writing team, like product designers, UX designers, project managers, etc.

Regular content team meetings

Review your content mood boards on a regular cadence, like in a weekly content team meeting, to see where things have changed and where updates need to be made.

Content reviews

Print your mood boards out. Use them as a visual artifact for tone, voice, and style checks. Hold current content drafts up to content mood boards to see if your whole team is writing consistently and strategically based on your vision.

Stakeholder Presentations

Add content mood boards into stakeholder presentations as a visual to help guide points and discussion on content strategy.

Mood board tools

• Canva
• Niice
• Moodboard

Mood board photo sources

• Photo by Quaz Amir from Pexels
• Photo by Wendy Wei from Pexels
• Photo by nappy from Pexels
• Photo by Garret Schappacher from Pexels
• Photo by Philbert Pembani from Pexels
• Photo by Artem Mizyuk from Pexels
• Photo by Luis Quintero from Pexels
• Photo by Vlad Bagacian from Pexels
• Microphone
• Cassette player