A choreographer once told me,
I don’t see choreography. I hear it.
And I knew exactly what she meant.
Because I don’t just look at design. I feel it.
I listen to what the project is trying to say, to what is hidden beneath the brief.
Not just how it should look, but what it wants to become.
Not just how it functions, but how it should make people feel.
Which brings me to the mood board.
I don’t start with them.
They are not the beginning. They are the translation.
Design doesn’t begin with swatches or screenshots.
It begins with a feeling. A purpose.
A moment of emotional clarity that guides everything that follows.
There is nothing wrong with beautiful references.
If you begin by collecting other people’s visuals before you understand your own intention, you are not designing. You are decorating.
Pinterest is filled with borrowed emotions and borrowed meaning.
Design should be personal. Intentional. True.
I begin by mapping the emotional arc.
What should someone feel when they arrive?
What should shift in them?
What do they carry when they leave?
Only then do I move toward form.
Once the emotional centre is clear, I translate it into space, material, rhythm, light, and tone.
I am blessed with a great team of designers who understand and connect with what I mean, even when the brief is still evolving or the feeling has not yet taken visual shape.
That is when the board becomes something more than a collage.
It becomes a map.
This is not new thinking.
Plato believed the visible world was a shadow of deeper truths.
That is how I approach design. I search for the emotional shape behind the expression.
Vitruvius taught us strength, function, beauty.
Design should be solid, useful, and then beautiful.
Aristotle reminded us that the soul never thinks without a picture.
That picture lives in the imagination, not just in what we see.
Design is not just how things look. It is how they behave.
A curve can soften. A colour can reassure. A shadow can tell a story.
People do not always know what is affecting them. They feel it.
I am not bored of boards.
I know where they belong.
Design should impress. That is part of the craft.
But the impressions that last do not come from styling.
They come from connection.
Because people do not remember polish.
They remember feeling.
Design begins in the mind.
