Top 3 fashion moodboard apps - advice from 500+ designer interviews
Theren Moodley
Co-Founder
A decade's worth of fashion experience across; product design, development, sourcing & logistics
In this series of blogs, we’ve explored the topic of fashion moodboarding.
It’s overview, it’s process, and finally some trends to help fashion designers create their perfect moodboard for fashion.
Today we'll look at some of the fashion moodboard apps available for fashion designers today, all based on the research from our design community.
But first, a quick summary:
Adobe Illustrator - A great generic design tool that is industry standard at this point, but has evoloved much in the past 5 years
Pinterest - The best image library today and a very useful free source of content, but is rigid and without any of the moodboarding functions a design needs
Make the Dot - The only moodboard app, built specifically for fashion designers, but is still in it's infancy as a product
Moodboard made with Make the Dot's fashion moodboard app
You can also checkout ore other blogs on the topic below 👇
The first moodboard generator is the the original, the most well known, but is in the best moodboard maker in 2022?
From the over 300 designers we spoke to, over 70% of them sighted Adobe as a bottle neck in their creative process when making a fashion moodboard 🙃
Let’s dive into why below.
Strengths
This moodboard generator is industry standard by this point, used by all designers from brands of all sizes, meaning its features are well known in a designers workflow. Well known, means designers need to spend spend less time learning a new online moodboard maker 💻
Illustrator is great for sketching and designing, meaning that when it comes generating a moodboard, a key component of the board is already in the canvas
Adobe have great deals for schools and students, which means the next generation are well used to the product by the time they use a moodboard generator at work 👩🎓
Weaknesses
Where to start…. ok let’s start with the performance. As Illustrator is not cloud based, you cannot really even say it's a fashion moodboard app, or online moodboard maker. It also means it's large, clunky, and it crashes. A lot. This is the most common feedback we've heard from our community.
Illustrator was built predominately to be a sketching software, so any other functions and features, such as moodboard generation and secondary to that. That means for designers, using the tool always feels like a compromise, compare with using a specific fashion moodboard app
Finally, there is also no multiplayer or team workspace features, which leads to downloads, multiple files being saved and a designers computer that looks much like the below
Almost every designer we spoke to in our research used it at some point in their design process.
However, when it comes to moodboard generation, using an online moodboard maker or app there comes some pretty large drawbacks 👎
Strengths
Pinterest has the richest library of images available on the market today. This enables all fashion designers to create an online moodboard relatively easily using and quickly📚
Not only it’s library of images vast, but it is also updated very regularly, which is important in an industry such as fashion, that relies on the latest trends
It’s price point, or lack of it. With Pinterest relying on an advertising business model, they are able to offer their vast library of content for 🆓, meaning designers can make a free moodboard online using their vast library of content and themes
Weaknesses
Pinterest is a library, and a great one at that, but that means that its online moodboard maker isn't as intuitive or flexible as a fashion designer needs. For example designers can't even resize their images when creating their moodboard, that a more flexible fashion moodboard app would allow
Because Pinterest isn't a specific fashion moodboard app, there isn't all the features required when generating a moodboard. Eye dropper, sketching, colour palette, tech pack creation, are a few components missing from the online moodboard maker.
But no seriously, our app is the only app on this list or on the market that was built specifically with designers for designers. That means it’s features, user journey and user experience has been built by the fashion design community 👩🎨
That’s not to say the fashion moodboard app doesn't have it's challenges, trust me there’s plenty.
But first lets start with the positives 🙌
Strengths
Our online moodboard maker was built by fashion designers for fashion designers. We’ve spoken to over 300 designers from around the world and built our fashion moodboard app, alongside them to ensure it improves the inspiration process 😍
Because of this we’ve built a designer specific user experience and features, including eye dropper, colour palette, browser extension and fabric widget, not available on any of the other fashion moodboard apps
Our up and coming fabric widget
Our app is a modern online moodboard maker. It’s cloud based, has a flexible monthly subscription model and is meant to be as easy to use and as sticky as Zoom, Slack or Notion, but for fashion 🧥
Finally, our fashion moodboard app has been designed and built to be used with our platforms and libraries such as Pinterest, Gem, Tagwalk etc, giving fashion designers the chance to pull content in from those libraries into our moodboard maker, while they're researching via our browser extension
Our browser extension in action
Weaknesses
Ok, time to rip the band-aid off 🩹The first weakness we have currently is our online moodboard maker is not quite yet the complete workspace for fashion designers, without major features such as sketch or a mobile app 🖊
We’ve built sharing and downloading capabilities but have yet to built any multiplayer or a team workspace features, meaning our adoption within teams in brands is currently limited 👷♀️
As it stands a subscription to our app during beta is $8 per month (after a 7 day trial), which means if Pinterest is good enough to make a free moodboard online, designers maybe choose their generic library as they moodboard generator of choice
And thats it, the three best moodboard makers on the market today 🥳
For our other moodboard related content, check that out below 👇
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