Team 20: Mood Boards and Style Tiles

Part 1: Our Mood Boards

Sonya’s Mood Board

When I created this mood board, I was inspired by Headspace! I want our app to be a friendly source of inspiration, personal growth, and accountability. I am impressed with how Headspace is able to gently – yet still firmly – coach beginning meditators through a practice that feels they consider to be intimidating. It encourages users to avoid guilting themselves when they break a streak, yet still pushes them to continue developing a meditation practice in spite of setbacks. Firm, but gentle. As I translated this ethos into a visual form, I was drawn to bright colors that evoke this same high-energy, motivated persistence. I picked a few people that look confident being their authentic selves, even if it’s challenging. Balancing out this energy, I also made sure to include references to rest: the white backgrounds, the watercolor tree branch, and the man gazing idly at time passing. When discussing this mood board as a team, the team noted that the hand-drawn elements made the mood feel too “artsy.” This vibe would be more appropriate for a creativity app, not a morning wake-up routine.

Jenny’s Mood Board

Since our app helps people get out of bed by making their morning experience in bed stimulating yet structured, I envision the mood to be stimulating within a calm and peaceful environment. In the picture above, the juxtaposition of the cooler colors with the bright shades of yellow conveys the idea that users can find joy and ease in something as hard as getting up in the morning and fighting the urge to go back to bed. The yellow indicates the sun, which has a natural stimulating effect on making people feel more awake. The green and blue indicate nature. So metaphorically, the first thing users see is not the black and white of their usual alarms UI, but this nature-ish and organic UI. When discussing this mood board as a team, the team noted that this board is too calm and needs more energizing elements.

Ellie’s Mood Board

For this mood board, I mainly gained inspiration from the largest image with the sun; I envisioned that our prototype could draw from the sun as a theme since the sun is associated with getting up in the morning. Thinking of the sun then brings yellow and orange to mind, leading to many orange-based colors among the other elements of the board. The pros of this board is a generally unifying color scheme and theme of the sun, while some cons could include that there are not that many components (perhaps due to resource constraints) and that the main image is more of a sketch, which may not exactly correlate with what we want our prototype to encompass. When discussing this mood board as a team, the team noted that some of the elements don’t feel entirely cohesive (such as the two images in the top left).

Our Team’s Synthesized Mood Board

We were surprised by the commonalities across our mood boards. All of us used bright tones to symbolize the morning sunrise and positive energy inherent to starting the day on the right foot. We kept this element in the final mood board, taking out elements in all of our boards that didn’t match the aesthetic. Next, we focused on the second commonality of juxtaposition. Sonya’s mood board juxtaposed energy with calm by placing bright colors next to white ones. Julie’s did it through the use of natural elements. We liked her approach better, which is why we assembled a board with many photo-realistic images. Combining her board with some of the brighter images from the other two boards created a very balanced aesthetic. Some of these images evoke calm, others evoke energy. Some do both. Overall, we created a board that is energizing because it is grounding, which is precisely the feeling we want to evoke in our users.

Style Tile

Here is the final style tile that our team settled on:

Yellow will be our primary color because we wanted to make users think of the sun and feel stimulated and empowered by the bright and warm color. We added lots of nature-inspired natural tones that cover the full spectrum of colors you might see if taking a morning walk. We focused on making our adjectives warm, bright, and energizing while keeping the feelings grounded.