A mood board app should keep your images, colors, and links in view while you do the work. Opal gives that board a place on your desk, right beside the notes, files, and tasks for the same project.

Most people pick a mood board app for the first afternoon of a project: collecting photos, swatches, and screenshots until a direction appears. The trouble shows up a week later, when the board lives in one app and the brief, the client’s notes, and the to-do list live somewhere else. This guide covers what a mood board is for, what to look for in a mood board app, and how to keep the board useful after the kickoff.

What a Mood Board Is Actually For

The Nielsen Norman Group defines a mood board as “a collage of images, video frames, patterns, or text that convey a certain feeling at a glance.” Its guide to mood boards in UX says teams use them to collect inspiration in one place, convey a product’s tone quickly, and align on where the design is going.

Research on designers backs that up. In a study presented at the ACM Designing Interactive Systems conference, Andrés Lucero found that mood boards play five main roles in the early stages of design: framing, aligning, paradoxing, abstracting, and directing. In plain terms, a board sets the limits of the job, gets the designer and client agreeing, holds ideas that seem to pull against each other, boils a feeling down to something you can see, and points the work in one direction.

Every one of those roles depends on people looking at the board again and again. A board that gets made once and then closed can’t frame or direct much of anything.

What to Look for in a Mood Board App

Most roundups of board tools compare templates and export options. Those matter if the board itself is the deliverable. If the board supports a bigger project, these questions matter more.

• Can you drop in anything? Photos, screenshots, PDFs, color references, and links to source pages all belong on a board.
• Can you arrange freely? NN/g suggests making the key images bigger or placing them in the middle, so you need a canvas you can move things around on.
• Can you keep separate boards apart? NN/g’s advice is to “make separate mood boards instead of squeezing them into one” when you have more than one concept.
• Can notes and decisions sit next to the images? A photo means more when the note beside it says why the client liked it.
• Can you share it, and with whom? Some boards need live collaborators. Others just need a read-only link for a client.
• Where does the rest of the project live? This one gets skipped most often, and it decides whether you’ll open the board again.

Why Boards Get Lost Once the Project Starts

A finished mood board often ends up in a separate tab, a separate login, or a PDF in a downloads folder. Then the project moves on to proposals, revisions, and tasks in other apps.

That split has a cost. In Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index, 62% of survey respondents said they struggle with too much time spent searching for information in their workday. Every trip to another app to check a color or a reference photo is one more search.

It also breaks focus. In 2023, psychologist Gloria Mark told the APA’s Speaking of Psychology podcast that attention on any one screen has averaged about 47 seconds in recent years, down from two and a half minutes in 2004. She describes a switch cost: “every time you switch your attention, you have to reorient to that new activity.” A board kept beside the work removes one of those switches.

How to Make a Mood Board That Stays Useful

NN/g lays out six steps: review existing brand materials, pick a tool, choose the moods, collect visuals, arrange them, and share the board. Here is a version for project work, where the board needs to last past the first meeting.

• Start from the brief. Put the brief or the client’s own words where you can see them, then pick four or five mood words from it.
• Collect wide, then cut hard. Pull from photos, magazines, screenshots, and past projects. Keep only what fits the moods you chose.
• Arrange by weight. Make the two or three images that carry the direction larger, and group colors, textures, and type together.
• Write the why. Add a short note beside key images: what to borrow, what to avoid, what the client said.
• Put it next to the work. Keep the board where you’ll see it when you write the proposal, pick materials, or review a draft.
• Share the right way. Invite collaborators who need to add to it, and send a read-only link to anyone who only needs to look.

Using Opal as a Mood Board App

Opal is a visual workspace with an infinite grid. It wasn’t built only for mood boards, but its parts fit the job well, and the board sits beside everything else for the project. Everything below is on the Opal features page.

Drop Images and Files Onto the Desk

Drag images, PDFs, and other files onto your desk and each one becomes its own item. An image shows on the grid and opens to a larger version. Link items hold a source page or product URL with a page of their own, where you can write notes in the same block editor as any doc. For more on why an open canvas helps, see this look at infinite canvas apps.

Use Fences as Boards

Draw a resizable fence around related items to make a zone, then move the whole group at once. One fence can hold the kitchen inspiration for a client, and the fence beside it the floor plan and finish samples. Change the color of notes, binders, and fences so each board is easy to spot from across the screen. That kind of visual organization is what makes a board quick to find again, and it leans on spatial memory: you remember where the board sits.

Keep the Brief, Notes, and Tasks Beside the Board

This is where Opal differs from a standalone board tool. Notes and docs sit right next to the images, wikilinks connect them, and tasks on the task panel link to the items they’re about. A live Google Doc or Sheet, like a budget or a product list, can sit in an iframe next to the board and be edited inside Opal. You can open many pages side by side in one tab, and if you lose track of something, search for it and Opal pans to where it sits.

Anna Zhikhareva, a freelance experience designer at AZX Design, put it this way on the Opal homepage: “Having the big holistic view of the project is the most important thing for me. Opal let me structure a lot of information in a way that makes it convenient without the cognitive overload. And there was no learning curve.”

Share or Publish the Board

Share a fence or binder full of items with specific people, and choose what each person can do with toggle-based permissions. A shared fence keeps one layout for everyone, which turns the board into a visual collaboration tool for the whole project. When a client only needs to look, publish the item, binder, or fence to a public link that anyone can view without an account. Freelancers running several client boards can find a fuller setup in this guide to freelancer tools.

When Another Mood Board App Fits Better

Opal suits project boards that need to live beside the work. Other tools do some jobs better.

• You want a polished, designed board as the deliverable. A template-based design tool such as Canva, or a dedicated board tool such as Milanote, gives you layouts and export options built for that.
• You’re running a live workshop with a group. NN/g notes that whiteboard tools like Miro, Mural, or FigJam work well for remote mood-board workshops.
• You mainly want to discover new ideas. Pinterest and Behance are built for browsing. Opal has no feed, so it only holds what you add. If Pinterest is where your references live now, this guide to a Pinterest alternative for work covers moving a board over.
• You build boards on your phone. Opal runs in the web browser. Native apps and a web clipper are on Opal’s roadmap but aren’t available yet.

Many people use both: a design or discovery tool to find and polish ideas, and a desk where the keepers stay beside the project.

Getting Started With a Project Mood Board in Opal

Pick one active project and give it a fence. Drag in the ten or so images you keep coming back to, add link items for any source pages, and put the brief and your notes inside the same fence. Add the tasks that came out of your last client conversation and link them to the items they’re about. Work from that desk for a week. If you find yourself glancing at the board instead of hunting for it, move the next project over. For the bigger picture of how the pieces fit, read this overview of a visual workspace app. Plans and limits are on the pricing page.

Key Takeaways

• A mood board frames a project, aligns people, and directs the work, but only if people keep looking at it.
• Judge a mood board app by how easily you can drop in images, arrange them, add notes, share, and keep the board near the rest of the project.
• Switching apps to find a reference adds searching and broken focus to the day.
• In Opal, fences act as boards beside the brief, notes, docs, and tasks, and you can share or publish them.
• Design tools, whiteboards, and Pinterest still fit polished deliverables, live workshops, and discovery.

FAQ

What is a mood board app?

A mood board app is a digital tool for collecting and arranging images, colors, textures, text, and links that set the look and feel of a project. Some tools focus on designing the board itself. Others, like Opal, keep the board inside a workspace beside the project’s notes and files.

What is the best mood board app?

It depends on the job. Template-based design tools suit a polished board you hand over, whiteboard tools suit live group workshops, and Pinterest suits discovery. If you want the board sitting beside the brief, notes, files, and tasks for a project, a visual desk like Opal is the closer fit.

Is there a free mood board app?

Some mood board tools advertise free versions, so check each tool’s own pricing page for current limits. Opal doesn’t have a free plan. Plans start at $9 per seat per month, or $7 per month billed yearly, and you can see every plan on the pricing page.

Can I make a mood board in Opal?

Yes. Drag images and files onto your desk, add link items for source pages, and draw a fence around them to make a board. You can color the fence, move it as a group, and keep notes, docs, and tasks right next to it.

Can I share a mood board with a client in Opal?

Yes. You can share a fence or binder with specific people and choose what each person can do, or publish an item, binder, or fence to a public link that anyone can view without an account.

Does Opal have a mobile app?

Not yet. Opal runs in a web browser. Native apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac are on Opal’s roadmap but aren’t available today.

How many images should a mood board have?

There’s no fixed number. Keep the images that fit the four or five moods you chose and cut the rest. If you’re holding two different directions, NN/g suggests making separate boards instead of squeezing them into one.

Keep Your Mood Board Beside the Work

• Drop images, files, and links straight onto your desk
• Use colored fences as boards for each project or concept
• Keep the brief, notes, Google Docs, and tasks next to the board
• Share a board with collaborators or publish it for a client

Set up your desk today