For the first two years of the studio, we opened every brand project the same way most agencies do: with a mood board. A curated grid of images pulled from Pinterest, Behance, other people’s portfolios, stock photography archives, and the occasional still from a Wes Anderson film. The boards were beautiful. Clients loved them. And they were, we eventually realized, doing more harm than good. The problem was not aesthetic. The problem was epistemological. A mood board answers the question “what could this feel like?” by pointing at things that already exist. It borrows tone, texture, and atmosphere from someone else’s finished work and pastes it onto a brand that has not yet done the thinking required to earn its own visual language. It is, in the most literal sense, derivative by design.
The moment we pin an image from another studio’s identity project onto a mood board, we have imported that studio’s decisions, context, and compromises into our client’s project. That moody, dark-green photograph of a wine bottle may have been art-directed for a specific client with a specific audience in a specific market. Stripped of that context and placed on a mood board, it becomes a vibe — and vibes are dangerously easy to agree on. A client looks at a mood board and says “yes, that feels right” without understanding what they’re actually approving. They’re approving a direction defined by someone else’s work, for someone else’s problem. When we then try to translate that borrowed feeling into an original identity, something always goes wrong. The final work either looks derivative (because it literally is) or it disappoints the client (because the mood board promised someone else’s finished product, and we delivered something that is necessarily different).
We noticed this pattern after our twelfth or thirteenth project. The mood board phase always generated enthusiasm. The concept phase that followed always generated friction. Clients would say things like “this doesn’t feel like what we approved” or “can we go back to the direction from the first presentation?” They were right to be confused. We had shown them a destination that didn’t actually exist on the map we were drawing. The mood board was a false promise, a visual contract we could not honour because the images in it belonged to other projects, other designers, other brands.
A mood board answers the question “what could this feel like?” by pointing at things that already exist. It is, in the most literal sense, derivative by design.
So we replaced mood boards with what we now call concept rationales. The format is different, and the difference matters. A concept rationale is a document — part written, part visual — that explains the strategic logic behind a design direction. It starts with the brand’s positioning, the audience’s needs, and the competitive landscape. It then proposes a visual thesis: a core idea that will govern every design decision. This thesis is expressed not through found imagery but through original sketches, typographic studies, colour explorations, and spatial compositions that we create specifically for the project. Nothing is borrowed. Everything is reasoned.
The concept rationale takes longer to produce. A mood board can be assembled in an afternoon; a rationale requires a week of focused work. But the downstream effects are transformative. Clients understand why a direction is being proposed, not just what it looks like. They can evaluate the thinking, not just the feeling. And when they have concerns, those concerns are specific and productive: “the typography feels too formal for our audience” is a much more useful critique than “this doesn’t feel like the mood board.” The rationale creates a shared language for discussing design. The mood board only creates a shared hallucination.
The rationale creates a shared language for discussing design. The mood board only creates a shared hallucination.
We have now delivered twenty-three projects using concept rationales instead of mood boards. The results are difficult to argue with. Client approval rates at the concept stage rose from roughly sixty percent on first presentation to over ninety percent. Revision rounds dropped by nearly half. More importantly, the final work is stronger. When a design direction is rooted in strategic reasoning rather than aesthetic mimicry, it develops its own internal logic. Every subsequent decision — the weight of a line, the warmth of a colour, the density of a layout — can be tested against the original thesis. The identity becomes self-evident rather than self-referential. The Terroir Wine Bar project is perhaps the clearest example: the visual language of old French wine catalogues emerged not from a mood board of vintage ephemera but from a strategic insight about the brand’s relationship to provenance and place. The engraved linework, the restrained palette, the typographic austerity — none of it was borrowed. All of it was argued for, from first principles.
We know mood boards are not going away. They are fast, they are easy, and they give clients the dopamine hit of seeing something beautiful early in the process. We understand the appeal. But we also know that the appeal is the problem. Design is not a mood. It is a series of decisions, each one justified by the one before it. When we stopped showing mood boards, we started showing our thinking. And our thinking, it turns out, is what clients were actually paying for all along.