The Design Den: Creating a Moodboard

Hello, and welcome to “The Design Den” — the blog where we share the development of Woodroffe’s yearbook!

We wanted to give you some insight into the tremendous amount of effort we are putting in to make sure we can deliver the best yearbook WHS has ever seen. You make the year—we make the book.

For the first edition, we wanted to give you a peek into our design process by using a moodboard.

One of the first steps towards creating the 2022 yearbook is to determine a direction for its look and feel. The yearbook class had to collectively determine factors such as illustration, colour, typography, layout, and more.

To do this, first we collaborated on a Google Jamboard and added to our pages anything that caught our eye—whether from the wider Internet, sources such as the magazines found using PressReader. Often, we also made a quick annotation to explain what about we liked, and how we might use it in the yearbook.

Then, we anonymously voted on which particular items we loved by using Pear Deck. The most popular picks made it to our collated moodboard.

Some themes and key ideas emerged:

✅ The comic book aesthetic became a must-have. Vintage comics in particular.

✅ Correspondingly, a muted colour palette with vintage or 70s tones became evidently desired.

✅ Line drawings of a tiger doing different things—maybe on the corner of each page—was an idea that came about through various reference points.

✅ We agreed that dynamic layouts that give space to the hero images and interest and variety on each page is very important.

We hope you enjoyed this first edition of “The Design Den”! See you next time.