Creating an Interior Design Board

How can you portray all of your great ideas to your client? It's quite simple. Using a design board you can place fabric samples, carpet samples, cut outs of furniture and paint colors. You may notice the term design board is interchangeable with the term mood board in interior design. You can also put on the actual inspiration cut outs that your client may give you. Using REAL color and material swatches will help make your design board as realistic as possible and much easier to convey your ideas to the client. 

Make sure you only have about 1-3 samples of a particular product. For example, display only 2 or 3 carpet samples on your design board because it may become too overwhelming for your client to handle if you put any more than that. Obviously, as an interior designer your job is to narrow it down as much as possible for your client. I am going to show you some examples of how I, working cohesively with the interior designer herself, have created a design board.

Above I am in the process of figuring out the placement of all the samples and furniture cut outs. What you see above are samples for a dining room, living room, guest room and bedroom with the correlating floor plan.

I later choose that the best idea is to put the bedroom on a separate board, so I cut the bedroom off of the whole floor plan and added it to my bedroom design board. Here you can see all of the fabric and carpet samples, paint colors, furniture cut outs and the actual inspiration the client has given from a magazine. The only thing I would change in the future is to print out the furniture larger to be able to see more detail and add borders around the furniture to stand out.

Above is the design board of the guest room (bottom left and fabric top left), living room (top middle/left) and dining room (top middle/right). There were 3 rooms on this one board. The carpet sample was to be used in three areas (dining, living and lounge area) since it is all one big space and the statement would be the printed curtain fabric (top right). Also, you can see on the top right is a cut out given by the client which is the inspiration in which the color scheme was made. 

You can see on the floor plan, I had cut out to scale each new furniture piece to see how it fits in the clients space. In the future I would include, to scale, the furniture pieces the client decided to keep in order to get a full visual of the furniture placement and size.

Above are the finished design boards being presented to the client. The colors that were picked for the young couple clients were very relaxing and the furniture is very eclectic with fun geometric patterns. I wish I could of recorded the clients reaction because she loved it!

As an interior designer, you want to be able to convey your ideas easily and simply to your client. They should be able to really envision their new space with all of your ideas. The boards in this post have specifications such as name of product, the store, dimensions and price on the back of the pictures since they are only taped onto the board. The other option would be to place numbers under each piece of furniture and then on a separate space on the design board list the numbers with the correlating information for each product. That would help if you plan on gluing down the papers and would be easier to find out that information. I hope that my experience with these design boards and my tips help you create your own outstanding design board! Till next time :)


Xo,