Mood Board

Mood Board allows artists, designers and other creative professionals a quick way to organize their concept documentation. Using a self contained single-document approach keeps all of your assets are exactly where you expect them to be on a per-project basis. No tags required!

Move and scale your content into just right position to convey a narrative thread or progression. Control opacity of items to create interesting juxtapositions quickly between two more more assets.

Set the background of the board to any number of interpretive colors based on the average color of all images on the board, any single image or the most unique color in the entire board. Non-destructively invert the color to make your assets leap off the screen.

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Changes in Version 1.2

(Fixed) There was a layer sorting issue that I wasn’t aware of until the most recent update. When you sorted layers using Send to Back / Bring to Front Mood Board was erroneously mixing up the layer order when exporting images.
(Improvement) Fixing layer sorting on export also exposed a few data model issues that makes sorting layers more consistent and faster overall now.
(Feature) Added the ability to pan over an infinite canvas. Mood Board doesn’t require that you set artificial document bounds and will allow you to place assets wherever you want at whatever size you want.
(Feature) After implementing the ability to pan the document it became immediately obvious that we needed to be able to Zoom as well. Mood Board now has full, animated zooming and panning!
(Feature) Several options have been added to make zooming fast and simple. Select an item and use Command+Option+Zero to focus the zoom on just that item (great for illustrators using source references.) Command+Zero to view at 100%.
(Feature) You can now group assets together into a selection set. This is really simple but very helpful in organizing boards with larger numbers of assets on them. Simply select a few assets and hit Command+G (Command+Shift+U to ungroup.)
(Feature) We use the default selection color specified in your system settings for Mood Board (I like Orange.) When you make a group, we use an inverse color to indicate that the item you have selected is a little different from normal. When you select a mixture of grouped and non-grouped items, we use the median color between the default selection color of your system and the inverse hue of that same specification.
(Feature) Implemented Masking! This is a huge feature to add this early in the application development cycle but now that I have added it I totally know it’s the right thing to do. Simply select an asset on your board and hit Edit (Command+E) to open the metadata panel. Masking options are currently limited to basic shapes but we’ll be adding arbitrary paths very soon. Current Mask types are:
- Oval - A circular mask based on the aspect ratio of the image.
- Square - An inset rectangular mask that can optionally have rounded corners.
- Diamond - A parallelogram based on the aspect ratio of the asset.
(Feature) Flip Assets! You can now flip assets quickly on your board using the metadata editor for an individual node.
(Improvement) When selecting assets in the past it wasn’t always clear which items were included in the selection set. This is due to the fact that selection was indicated as a border around all selected assets. Now through the magic of CoreImage we apply some simple image kernels to any selected assets that make it absolutely clear what’s selected.

Changes in Version 1.1

(Fixed) Image sorting when adding new assets to your Boards. This means that new materials will always be at the top of your stack in the document, ready for you to move into position as you see fit. It also inadvertently means that assets stay “in order” more reliably.
(Fixed) the crashing bug reported from users attempting to drag images directly from the new “modal” google image search results into a board. This was caused by my erroneous assumption that the urls posted to the clipboard by Safari (ne. google) would actually be sane strings. Short answer, they are nothing like what you’d consider to be an actual url.
(Feature) Added the ability to pan the view. This is done using two-finger scrolling on the trackpad. Implementation should work similarly on any supported device for multi-touch input. (I’m working out how this should function for non-standard devices, would love to hear from users if this is a big issue.)
(Fixed) Export and Edit Node were conflicting on Command+E. Export is now (the more standard) Command+Shift+E while edit remains Command+E.
(Feature) Implemented the ability to zoom into boards. This is a pretty big feature and I am almost positive that we’ll be revisiting this. When you bring in assets at native scale we should be able to up-sample those assets while you’re zooming so that if you have the resolution in an asset you get to see more detail. Whether or not this is happening natively is hard to tell because my display is higher resolution and everything pretty much always looks awesome.
(Fixed) The scale tool now responds in the way you’d expect a state-ful tool to act. Instead of snapping to min-scale when you drag in either direction, scaling now only offsets the current asset scale making things feel far more natural. While I’d agree that Mood Board doesn’t scale things normally (always from the bottom right edge?!) this is for a reason that should be come more clear in the next update.
(Feature) I’ve improved rendering performance by almost 30% so even boards containing large numbers of assets should render more quickly. The background plane is now ready for you to be able to assign custom art and overload the color selection models to be able to produce exactly the kind of board you want.
(Feature) I’ve also implemented a new color selection setting called “Most Unique” This works by calculating the average of all selected assets and then picking from that set the one color that most deviates from the selected average. If you work with pictures of jewelry this is really going to help you find better background colors to let you focus on your overall color-styles. If you had a silver band with a colored gem in a setting, shot on a white background; you would get the color the gem almost every time in your board background selection.