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How to build a wedding mood board that your suppliers can actually use
· Lucas Viegas · 6 min read
A wedding mood board is a supplier brief, not a scrapbook. One sentence at the top, then seven ingredients: place, light, palette, flowers, the table, dress and suit shapes, stationery. Twenty to thirty images, handed over in one link.
Below: the brief, the seven rows, the cut, the handover, and how the board keeps working until the day.
What is a wedding mood board actually for?
It is read by people you are paying. A florist, a planner, a photographer, a stationer, each deciding something on a Tuesday morning with you nowhere near the room. The test is whether a florist could order stems from it without phoning you.
Which means it starts with a sentence, not with images. “A November lunch in a stone barn for eighty people, warm and slightly formal, nothing rustic.” Under it go the two facts that outrank every picture: the venue and the hour. They set the light, and the light decides whether a palette survives the day.
So a wedding aesthetic comes out of the place and the hour rather than being chosen first. A wedding vision board is a different object, and the difference between a mood board and a vision board is the short version of why.
What goes on a wedding mood board?
Seven kinds of thing and nothing else. Each row settles a question somebody would otherwise settle for you later.
| Ingredient | Images | What it settles | Who reads it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Place | 2 to 3 | The room everyone works inside: ceiling, walls, floor, the doors people use. | Everybody, first |
| Light | 2 to 3 | The hour you are planning for. Window light at noon, candles at eight. | Photographer, florist |
| Palette | 4 to 6 swatches, one dominant | Which colour carries the room and which is only an accent, as a proportion. | Florist, stationer, stylist |
| Flowers | 4 to 6 | Shape and density before variety: tight and low, loose and tall, one stem or twelve. | Florist |
| The table | 3 to 4 | Linen or bare wood, glass, plates, candle height, how crowded a setting gets. | Planner, stylist, rentals |
| Dress and suit shapes | 3 to 4 | Silhouette, fabric weight, and how formal the whole day reads. | You, the tailor, the photographer |
| Stationery | 2 to 3 | Typeface, paper, ink weight, printed or written by hand. | Stationer, sign writer |
Twenty to thirty images in total. A wedding colour palette board feels obvious enough to skip, right up until two suppliers arrive with two different greens.
How do you build one, step by step?
Three hours of real work, spread over a week so the cut lands on a different day from the gathering.
Eight steps, from one sentence to one link
- 1Write the sentence. What kind of day, for whom, and the one quality it must have. Put the venue and the hour underneath. A sentence that rejects nothing is too soft.
- 2Open one public Pinterest board. Name it for the wedding and the version, “Barn November v1”. Public, so a supplier opens it on a phone without an account.
- 3Gather wide, by ingredient. Search the thing, not the category: “low loose table arrangement”, not “wedding inspiration”. Save 100 to 150 pins and judge none of them yet.
- 4Cut on a different day. Re-save the survivors to a new board. Keep only what decides something the others do not. Stop between 20 and 30.
- 5Count the seven rows. An empty row is a decision handed to somebody else by accident. Fill it on purpose, even with a plain swatch.
- 6Mark the instructions. Four or five images are orders, not direction. Caption those in the pin note: “this stem density”, “this ink weight”.
- 7Hand it over. One link to everyone, plus a flat export of the rows that are theirs and one sentence each. Ask what they think it says.
- 8Keep it in sight. A new pin now has to displace an old one. Check the board at every fitting, tasting and sample table.
What should you cut from a wedding Pinterest board?
Five things, in this order. Anything shot in a season or a light that is not yours. The second version of an image you already have. Whole weddings, because a wide shot of somebody else’s day settles nothing and the useful save is a crop of one part of it. Anything the venue forbids or the budget cannot reach. And anything there only because it is beautiful.
Then the test. Ask somebody who has never met you to describe your wedding from the board in three sentences. A mood means keep cutting. A room, an hour, a colour and a flower shape means stop.
How do you hand it to a supplier?
Nobody wants your whole board. Everyone gets the same link, so there is one source, and then a flat export of the rows that are theirs with one sentence attached. The florist gets place, light, palette, flowers and the table; the stationer gets palette and stationery.
The sentence does more work than the pictures. “The palette is the two greens and the off white; the pink stays under a tenth of what you see.” A board with a proportion on it is a brief. Without one it is a wish.
Then ask for it back: “tell me what you think this board says” finds the disagreements in March, not November. And never quietly replace a board that has been quoted against. Build v2 on a new board and leave v1 as it was seen, the rule the brand and project method ends on.
How does the board keep working until the day?
Planning runs for a year, so the board has two lives: for the first month it decides, and for the eleven after that it defends. Every fitting, tasting and site visit holds the real thing up against it.
Three habits. Add sparingly. Photograph the real, because the gap between your sample table and the reference beside it is the whole conversation with your suppliers. Prune what is settled. If it has grown into several boards, organising Pinterest boards covers keeping a set legible.
Where should the board live while the wedding is planned?
Somewhere you pass daily. A board you open only when a supplier emails stops deciding things, and the vision board wallpaper page makes the same argument for goals.
On a Mac the desktop is the honest answer, and VisionWall is how I do it. It is made by the writer of this post, so weigh that accordingly: a macOS menu-bar app that turns any public Pinterest board into a live, rotating desktop wallpaper, reshuffled into a new masonry composition on every refresh, every 30 minutes by default and anywhere from 2 minutes to 2 hours. New pins appear on their own, and each display gets its own composition. One-time $9.99, macOS 13.3 (Ventura) or later, public boards only.
What else do people ask about wedding mood boards?
How many images should a wedding mood board have?
Between 20 and 30 after the cut, from a gathering board of 100 to 150. Below about 15 the seven rows cannot all be filled, so somebody else fills them.
One board, or one board per supplier?
One board, then a flat export of the relevant rows per supplier. Separate boards drift within a month and the florist ends up on a different palette than the stationer. The dress is the usual exception, kept secret.
Is a wedding mood board the same as a wedding vision board?
No. A wedding vision board pictures the day you want and is for you. A wedding mood board decides how the day will look and is read by people you are paying.
Should the Pinterest board be public or secret?
Public for the board suppliers work from: it opens without an account on any phone, and other software can read it. Secret for anything a guest should not stumble on, meaning the dress.
What happens to the board if the venue changes?
Rebuild the place and light rows first, then re-check every image against the new light. Palettes usually survive a move; flower shapes and table settings often do not.
Interior mood board
One room, one board, decisions you can defend.
Read the postPhotoshoot mood board
What a photographer and a crew need to see.
Read the postA year of planning. One board, on the desktop.
One-time $9.99, macOS 13.3 or later, public boards only.
Get VisionWall · $9.99