Why do your homework just once, when you can do it six times?! In my last post, I mentioned that this week’s homework assignment, for Blogging Your Way, was to create a ‘mood board’ that best reflects the emotional side of our blogs. When first reading this task, I groaned. Artwork? Instagram? My comfort zone was once again being stripped away from me.
I researched. Mood boarding sounded even more complicated than I had imagined. I chatted with Richard. He thought it would be lame. I took a deep breath. I tried one. It really wasn’t so bad. I tried another. I surprisingly felt that I was getting the hang of it. And another. I could easily see how this could become an addiction!
Retirement Reflections turns one on January 1. (The only successful New Year’s resolution that I have ever made!) I had planned to do some blog-related pondering and reworking at that time. This assignment, along with the insightful readers’ comments on my last post, has put me ahead of schedule. Despite my initial fears, mood boarding has been an extremely focused way to help me zoom in on my purpose, and get to the core of what I most wish to express.
Alongside this post are six mood boards. Each one uses a combination of word cloud and a photo (or photos) from one of my past posts. Although this style may not represent a ‘traditional mood board,’ I felt that this combination was well-suited to my blog.
Once again your comments will be greatly appreciated (especially on anything that you believe is missing) and will continue to help with my blog retweaking.
Word clouds were created at: https://worditout.com
Retirement Reflections 
It looks very interesting.
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Thanks, Kate. Despite my initial skepticism, it was a very enjoyable and insightful process.
Donna
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Very nice! Right before I retired, I put together a “vision board” with words and pictures I cut out from magazines (kind of an analog version of yours, I guess). Everything I chose reflected my vision of my ideal retirement life. I still have it and enjoy comparing my vision to my reality.
The blogging course you are taking sounds interesting.
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Mood boards seem like a good way to get to the “bottom” of things…. topics, content, feelings, goals… What is the final purpose of them? That you pick the most resonating terms and integrate them in posts or a blog description?
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Hi, Liesbet – Mood boards are used in a variety of disciplines, for a variety of reasons. Interior decorators often used them to bring paint chips, and swatches of fabric together so that they can show the home (or business) owner the overall atmosphere that the designer is attempting to create. For my blogging course, the purpose of the mood boards was to create a visual ‘elevator speech’ that instantly conveyed what our blogs were about. Another purpose of creating these boards in our course was to help each blogger get down to the core of what they wished to express. As I mentioned to Kate, I was skeptical at first. Once I got started, I found the process to be very illuminating. Donna
Donna
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Love them. OK, I need details! (I want to make one.) Did you put one full blog post into the worditout site to get each set of words? Or multiple posts? I noticed joy was big in a couple! Love that.
Like Janis, I’ve also used vision boards. I created one last January for “My Year – 2016”. [How to – go buy 5-6 magazines that “speak to you” at the store – we have a half price books store that has old magazines. Pull pictures from the magazines that speak to your topic. Then with scissors and a glue stick and a piece of poster board, create your “collage” of pictures. If you want to then write the story of your vision – since I’m a word girl, I did this as well. ] I kept my vision board out all year and often looked at it while morning journaling. I realized last week that a lot of it has come true! I’m planning on doing one again for 2017. Oh yeah, I feel a blog post coming on! Now I need to learn how to embed pictures in a blog post!!
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Hi, Pat – I experimented around a bit and ended up entering three full blog posts into Word-it-out. If I were doing it again, I would enter only the post that went with the feature picture that I was using. Word-it-out allows you to set your own terms (e.g. how often a word must appear to be used, if you wish to use all text or eliminate some words, etc., etc.) I found the whole process to be very user-friendly.
I would love to see a post from you on your vision-boarding experience. Here’s a link to a WordPress cheat sheet on embedding pictures, videos, tweets, etc. into a blog post. https://codex.wordpress.org/Embeds Hope this helps.
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Great idea. In away it’s like brainstorming or word-associating what your blog is about, or maybe it’s a way to create links — anyway, it does help develop the blog environment … and maybe helps you focus as well. Good job!
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Thanks, Tom – It was a bit like brainstorming and word-association. I found it to be a very worthwhile process.
Donna
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What fun! I just did a mood board for my most recent post (suicide by tetherball). It captures the mood quite nicely!
I subscribed to your blog before, but haven’t gotten any posts. I’m going to try again!
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Hi, Elyse – I was so captivated by the words in that post, that I never noticed your mood board. I will go back and look now.
I am delighted to have you follow my blog. I just checked the list of both my email and wordpress followers and didn’t see you there (unless you used a different email address). Fingers crossed that it works for you on the second try. I plan to publish my next post early this coming Sunday morning. Hope to see you there!
Donna
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