So, I wanted to do a post about one of my very favorite things: Mood Boards! I will basically put together a mood board for just about anything. I find them to be not only super fun to design but also very helpful for figuring out what a brand or even just a logo should feel like. It’s easy to say, “I want my brand to be fun, approachable, and quirky with a bit of a 70s pop art feel,” but it makes much more of an impact to see this:

Confession time: before Biller Designs got serious about doing website and design work full time, the brand wasn’t cohesive at all. I had slapped together a logo with all of the planning and intent of none at all and originally had this:

This isn’t terrible, but it was incredibly difficult to do anything with. The orientation is basically fixed, there aren’t any colors for thematic continuity, and the letters were sized in such a way that it wasn’t possible to just use pieces because breaking it up made it unrecognizable. On top of that, the website was kind of a hot mess in terms of visual consistency, but it didn’t occur to me that it was problematic until I did a branding exercise that began with a mood board.

When the mood board was finished and I was able to see the board all together, I was instantly able to define the voice and visual style of Biller Designs. Also, the shortcomings of the current brand were immediately apparent. With the board as a guide, I was able to make what I consider to be a very visually consistent and memorable website and brand style. My goal is to have such a specific visual voice, you could say, that when someone sees a worksheet I made for this blog or a piece of pop art in a Biller Designs social media post, they say, “Oh yeah, that is a Biller Designs graphic.” I also think it’s super important to watermark almost anything you create, but that’s a topic for another post. Seriously, I am writing it for next week.

Examples

Let me give you another couple of examples. This is a board I did for Winfield Wax Spa in Winfield, KS. We set up a mutual secret Pinterest board and she pinned about 40 images that she liked for one reason or another. She commented on each pin what it was about each image that appealed to her.

Using this collection of images, we were able to nail down exactly how she wanted her new brand to feel: light, airy, floral, feminine.

This last example is for another project from Tina and me called The Retail Chefs. We want to be able to use our specialty retail experience to help businesses coach and motivate their sales teams. We both love cooking (and cookware) and the food/chef/cooking theme really lends itself to the sales and marketing wordplay. It’s a lot of fun, honestly, but that brand originally suffered from some of the same visual continuity problems as the first iteration of Biller Designs. Here is the mood board I created to really define the visual language for The Retail Chefs:

This whole brand is just a gas. I love working on it. The retro, atomic age radio and the sweet strawberry shakes on the teal diner chairs were the main informers of this palette. Here are some of the graphics that are based on this mood board: 

The colors and shapes just scream 1950s diner (which keeps the food thing going) and, again, it is very easy to see what is “on” brand and what isn’t.

It is our practice at Biller Designs to do a mood board for every client that is getting website design or logo design from us. As you can probably tell, it is very illuminating and absolutely worth the time to dutifully go through the whole process.

Until next time!
-CB <3

P.S. If you want to see the boards I am working on, check out Biller Designs on Instagram. I just like mood boards so they pop up in my feed pretty often.

And just because Mood Boards make me so happy:

It’s a familiar scene. Someone needs just “a short bio” from you and so here you are in front of your blank document trying to figure out where to even start writing this thing. You Google “How to Write a Bio” and try to mash together a bunch of different suggestions and emulate the examples you like, but somehow, this process takes hours. “How can that be?” you think. “This is me! I know plenty about myself! Why can’t I think of anything to write?”

I’m going to try to help you out. I have written lots of different bios (long, short, and everything in between) for many different things (websites, recital programs, social media) and I find that the best way to approach this task is to have a system, but not so strict a system that it becomes basically a Mad Lib. Cookie cutter bios are everywhere and not only do they all sound the same, they are boring and don’t hold the reader’s attention. If that’s not the whole point, I don’t know what is.

The Process

My process has 3 main parts: Audience + Purpose= Tone, High Points, and Magical Writing Dust.

Audience + Purpose = Tone

First and foremost, you need to know your audience (who will be reading your bio), your purpose (why they will be reading your bio) and once you have solid answers for these two, those answers can inform your tone (the overall feel of your bio). If you are writing content for the About page on your website, your audience is your potential clients or customers, and your purpose is to give them information about your experience and your personality, for lack of a better word. When clients read your bio, they should get a sense of what it will be like to work with you. 

Your tone can do this as well as the specific pieces of information you share. Working with a person who has a very serious personality is going to be a very different experience than working with someone who has a more laid-back attitude. Using very neutral, professional language projects seriousness, while using more colloquial language projects levity. Neither is better or worse, but attracting clients who have a work style similar to yours can be beneficial to both you and your clients, so it’s important to be true to your own voice. Identifying your audience and clarifying your purpose will help you decide on the tone of your bio.

High Points

Now that you kind of have an idea how you want your bio to sound, you need to get a plan for what you want to say. The two most important components of your bio are:

Relevant Experience – ex. Industry experience for 5 years, previous job responsibilities, training classes you’ve attended or certifications or degrees you’ve earned.
Personal Tidbits – ex. You have lived in the area your whole life, you like dogs, enjoy long walks on the beach.

To add that special, readable quality to your bio, you need one more element:

Something Extra – ex. Your business philosophy, your commitment to supporting a local charity, why or how you got into this field in the first place. This piece is where you can really let your personality shine!

What I usually do is just list at least 3 or 4 things for every High Point. You might not use every one of them, but it’s good to have lots of material to choose from. Once you’ve gotten your High Points organized, then it’s time to for the Magical Writing Dust.

Magical Writing Dust

This is where you actually write the bio! Yay! I like to think of it as sprinkling Magical Writing Dust on all of your information so it becomes more interesting than just a list of facts about you. This is another place that your Tone from Step 1 comes into play. The structure and language can make your writing sound very professional or very casual, or somewhere in the middle. First, you need to decide how you want your bio to lay out. A classic structure is Intro, Experience (in chronological order), and Conclusion. Since you’ve already figured out what pieces of information you want to include, it’s just a matter of choosing what section they go into. For example, the High Points in my bio are organized like this:

Intro:
Twitter bio
Interests

Experience (in chronological order):
Early Design
Website Creation
Tech Start-Up
Current Business

Closing:
Business Philosophy

I could just as easily move the elements around and still have an informative bio, but I wanted to strike a more informal tone, so I opened with my interests rather than the more prevalent, and arguably more professional, style of closing with interests. What can I say? I’m a rebel.

Connecting the Dots

When you’ve got everything in the order you want, add in some connecting language. Before, after, next, and then are all good ways to transition from one sentence to another and help your bio tell a story. From a writing standpoint, a best practice is not to start more than two sentences in a row with the same word, so those connectors can come in pretty handy.

Ex. I worked at one place doing something. I worked at another place doing another thing.
Can become
After becoming interested in the field, I worked at a place doing something. Then, when I had advanced my skills, I moved on to another place doing a different thing.

Another good way to vary your language in this step is to flip the sentences a little.

Ex. I worked at a place doing something
Can become
I worked doing something at a place.

Just remember that the way to keep your reader interested is to give them the information they need wrapped up in an engaging package that is true to your voice.

You Did It!

Once you string all of your sufficiently different sentences together, that’s it! You can basically repeat this process any time you need to write an informative summary of yourself and your experience. It’s handy to have the list of potential bio components around so that if you want to emphasize a certain part of your work history or experience, you can easily add it in or swap other less relevant pieces out. Then you can just sprinkle whatever kind of Magical Writing Dust you need on it at the end with your language and structure to determine the tone. Having two separate bios- a more low key bio, as well as a very professional bio- ready to go, is also a great way to save TONS of time writing and rewriting later on.

And to top it off, it is just your lucky day! I have created a worksheet to help walk you through these steps (get it here). Feel free to it pass along to other bio writers out there. Sharing is caring, my friends. Until next time!

-CB <3