Mood boards are a great way to visualize ideas and concepts. You can use them to simplify an upcoming project or to expand on a personal aesthetic. Whatever your intentions for creating a mood board, you're going to need a medium to create one.
We're going to show you how to use the Same Energy visual search engine to create and customize mood boards.
What Are Mood Boards and Why Do You Need Them?
Mood boards originated in the physical form of scrapbooking or collaging. Remember those big bulky albums we'd fill up with photos and decorate with beads, fabric, and glitter? Or old books in which we'd make collages from cutouts of our favorite bands? Those were the early days of mood boards.
Over the years, we've turned this ability to capture an aesthetic or concept into something functional. Mood boards are now digital for the most part, however, you'll still find some practical uses for physical mood boards such as wedding planning, selling fabrics, and so on.
It functions as a tool for affixing scattered ideas into one location. For example, if you're in charge of planning your company's Christmas party, you can find several pictures of trees, decorations, and food, and put them together on a mood board. Not only will it serve as a place that contains all your ideas, but it will also give you a more objective view of how everything will look put together.
There are many variants of mood boards. Some sites and apps allow you to save pictures into a collection—this is the most simplified version of a mood board, as it's just like a photo album. Some also provide specific layouts to sort the pictures into what would resemble a collage. And for the creatives, you can always use photo editing apps to make your own from scratch.
Today we're going to focus on the former, a more basic type of mood board that you can create on Same Energy.
What Is Same Energy?
Same Energy is an image search engine where you can find millions of pictures of art, photos, designs, and more. It was developed by Jason Jackson with the objective of finding a style of image with minimal effort.
The site doesn't use keywords or tags, but rather styles and themes based on your search. The pictured results are not only based on the object but the overall vibe of the image. For example, if you search "black crow," you're more likely to get gothic-themed images that feature a black crow.
Getting Started With Same Energy
The Same Energy site is free to use, and you're going to need to register if you want to create mood boards. To do this, go to Same Energy and click Log In at the top right.
Then, select Sign Up in the box that pops up and enter your details. No email confirmation is required, and you'll immediately be logged in.
The homepage will be filled with random images, none of which adhere to any specific theme. You're bound to find something you like if you scroll long enough. In the bar atop the pictures, there are trending themes you can select.
You can also conduct your own search by typing words into the search bar or dropping an image anywhere on the homepage. It will spew out a seemingly endless amount of images that capture and embody the mood of your search.
You'll notice that whenever you click on an image, all of the images around it will change in real-time to match that one. Click on another one, and the surrounding pictures will transform again, corresponding with the slight change of each newly selected image. This creates a chain of ever-changing themes that can help you pinpoint the style you're looking for.
How to Create a Mood Board on Same Energy
To create a mood board, you're going to utilize the Collections feature on Same Energy. Here's how to do that:
- From the homepage, click on Collections at the top right.
- Select Create New.
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A box will appear in which you can name your collection. When done, click OK. You can create a multitude of collections.
To save images to one of your collections:
- Conduct your search.
- Hover over the image you want to save and click on Save.
- Click on Saved To and select the designated collection from the dropdown. It will save automatically without confirmation.
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From there, you can select View Collection or Undo.
In your collections, the images will appear in the order that you've saved them. Unfortunately, you can't move them around. A way around shifting them is to remove and re-add them in a different order.
While viewing a collection, there will be a Recommended section right below. These are all the images that Same Energy's AI recommends based on the combination of the images in your collection. Refreshing the page will result in a new display of suggested pictures.
When you click on an image from within a collection, it will come into full view with several options. At the top, it will show the image name and the website it originates from.
Copy allows you to copy it over to another collection while keeping it in its current one. The Move function will move it from the current collection and into another one that you choose. Selecting Remove From Collection will delete the image entirely.
If you want to find images similar to the selected one, click on Search and Same Energy will present all of the images that match its theme.
One of the cooler features is Combine. When you click it, it will prompt you to select another image from the collection. The search result will be based on a combination of the two selected images.
Mood Boards Made Simple With Same Energy
Creating mood boards doesn't always require a fancy layout. The Same Energy visual search engine simplifies the process of building a theme, and the Collections feature is clean and easy on the eyes.
If you're just starting out with mood boards, or if you simply want an effortless flow when creating them, Same Energy is perfect for you.