The creative process has become too self-conscious. Just look at what the moodboarding process has turned into. A photographer, art director, or interior designer once used a moodboard as a tool. In its purest form, you pinned images on a wall to help you find or define a direction for a project. Then the moodboard became part of the standard commercial workflow, where it was tasked with accomplishing more. Say you’re hired to shoot for a brand campaign. Before you can execute your idea, you need approval from your client, so you create a moodboard with your “proof of concept.” Now your moodboard has an agenda. It has to sell something.
This was the engine behind Pinterest, a place to find visual inspiration for just about any creative project. Pinterest was a resource to assist you in your creative process, but it was also a social platform. You curated, you pinned your inspiration to your various boards. Suddenly, we were all art directors creating a proof of concept for everything: our home, our outfits, our future wedding, our 26th birthday party. We browsed our feed and pinned our pins with an audience in mind; we knew it all said something to someone about our taste.
Now, it seems, taste is the end goal in itself. We’re no longer creating moodboards to fuel our creative work. The moodboards are our creative work. We bring our references into digital canvases and move images around, creating little universes on our screen, feeling as though we’ve made something. You see these complex boards and systems shared online, but you never see what actually comes from them. You see whimsical handmade moodboards all over Substack, and it seems they were made just for the sake of posting them. These moodboards are designed; they’re looking over their shoulder to see what you think of them.