MSR Mood Board

Established: January 12, 2014

Microsoft Research Mood Board is a Windows application that combines image search, image collection, and sketching to support creative activities. Update: this project/app has been retired.

About Mood Boards

Mood Boards are collages of images, sketches, and descriptions used by designers to explore different visual styles. Once a Mood Board is sufficiently populated a designer may then create design concepts using the elements on the Board for inspiration.

(Images from Bing image search)

In a collaborative environment a designer may initially get design requirements from stakeholders who may not be designers themselves, and who may therefore describe their expectations in ambiguous terms. For example, a client may say “I’m looking for something modern, succinct, fashionable, warm, and slick”…

(Images from Bing image search)

… which may give rise to these design
concepts.

Or they may say “I want something that reminds me of different materials.” For example
wood, earth, stone, metal, and so on…

(Images from Bing image search)

… resulting in these concepts.

MSR Mood Board

And so to support such activities around the discovery of non-designerly content, Microsoft Research has implemented a digital Mood Board application that allows the discovery, lay out, annotation, and integration of such content into the process of exploring design concepts.

In addition, Mood Board can be set to run in the background at the user’s visual periphery to allow serendipitous encounters that fill in moments of idleness.

How to use

Step one

Open the app, enter the search terms in the search box, and click on the search button to search. You may enter up to five search terms.

(Images from Bing image search)

Step two

Tap any thumbnail to expand it for a
closer look. The Download arrow in the upper-left corner
downloads the image to the canvas.

(Images from Bing image search)

Step three

When you’re done selecting images, tap
or swipe-up the slider at the bottom of the screen to switch
to the canvas.

(Images from Bing image search)

Step four

This is the mood board canvas,which contains all the images you selected. Here you can rearrange and resize images, and add text or sketched annotations.

(Images from Bing image search)

Step five

Tap the New Page icon to add a new page
to the canvas.

(Images from Bing image search)

Step six

Tap or swipe-down the slider at the top
of the screen to go back to Image Search.

(Images from Bing image search)

Mini-mode

Mood Board can also run in mini-mode, allowing you to view your image search results in the background. Use this mode when you want to focus on other things, but still want to keep the images in view for inspiration.