The other day I faced a creative wall. A very big creative wall. I needed to create a moodboard for uni that completely encapsulated the fragrance brand I had created. Usually, I love a good old moodboard. But not that day. That day, it was possibly the worst thing I could have to do. For some reason, I just wasn’t in the right creative headspace. I’d been putting off doing the moodboard for days because I just didn’t know what kind of images to put on it. Previously with other briefs I have been alright with the concept aspect within the FCP process. These are the steps we have to take in our course to fully display the process of our ideas leading to outcomes. So, for this one, I don’t know why I was going into it with a kind of meh attitude, but I was, and I couldn’t escape it. I began creating my moodboard by finding images from Pinterest, which usually inspires me and gets me excited for the creative process. However, this time, my images just weren’t calling my name. I’d had them saved for a few days and although they were great images, nothing was shouting out at me that truly captured what I wanted to portray my brand as. I spent all day experimenting, but I just didn’t end up with anything I liked. It kind of felt like a chore to get the moodboard done, and if I had all the time in the world I would have just have had that day off and came back to it the next, but time was of the essence and my project was due in at 11am the next morning. And it was 9pm the night before. One of the moodboards I created I showed in our afternoon seminar session, introducing it alongside the comment ‘I don’t like this lol’.
Without boring you with all the details about what my fragrance brand is all about, I’ll put it simply as an all-inclusive brand where I want to value and enhance your own individuality, with yellow as the dominant colour used. My bottle is completely mirrored, because how else can I express individuality without using my consumer’s own face? Anyway, this moodboard was not one I was proud of. I just think it’s boring and plain. I’ll be honest, I reached a point in the making of it where I just couldn’t be bothered anymore and just left it. The whole point of this blog post is to just explain that that’s okay. It is completely okay to not like the work you produce. Yes, it may seem tiring and frustrating to create things that your mind just puts in the bin, but sometimes this leads to great things. It also shows you the things you should stay clear from, because you know you’re just not going to like them. In our seminar I could see the way people were doing their concept moodboards, and they were incredible, but just not the style I do my work in. I kind of go for a full-on approach, I don’t really like white space. I like choosing multiple background images and cutting out others to layer on top. But these moodboards being sent in and being labelled as extremely successful were all beautifully and carefully placed images with white borders.
So I tried to mimic this, and ended up with this:
When I tell you I hated this, I really hated it. I didn’t think it embodied my brand at all, and it was just boring and plain. Not my fun and fresh brand idea. So, I began randomly collaging images I had because I do love a good collage. I took the beginning of it and mixed my approach with the careful minimal approach, and came up with this:
I still don’t love it, but it’s better than what I had before. A busy collage style on one side with the more carefully placed images on the other. I shoved my usual style with something a bit different and came up with my best alternative. This collage actually led me to produce another quick image I actually really like and think expresses my brand in some ways. This shows that a quick experiment and play around can actually lead to a success.
This whole process has shown me that it’s okay to not enjoy a step of your development, and it’s okay for it to not work out how you want it to. Sometimes it’s all about the mentality you approach it with, and some days you simply just won’t be in a creative place. And that’s normal, and once again that’s okay! You’re not going to love every single thing you produce, so don’t beat yourself up about it if all you want to do is put your work in the rubbish bin. But don’t put it in the rubbish bin, keep it to show your development and you’ll be able to look back on it in a couple of months and see how far you’ve come in your creative process. It’s all a learning curve! You’ve got this.
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