I recently stumbled upon a really cool design and branding tool called Style Tiles (styletil.es). These tiles are simply mood boards for the branding of a website. It breaks down color options, textures, font styles, and the general tone of a design. The purpose of Style Tiles are to present a client or an internal department with quickly made options for a design. This helps you gather more specific feedback about what the client is looking for. The tiles give the client the ability to visualize multiple design options at once without having to use any imagination. This helps the designer so that they do not have to jump in to the visual design process with no direction. It also saves the designer a lot of possible wasted time if they did an entire mockup and the client did not like it.

Below is an image of the example tiles the site provides.

Using this very basic template we built 3 design directions for a client to critique.

The client responded extremely well to this new practice because it allowed them to express to the designer what they liked and didn’t like and give them a clear understanding without having to know any complicated design lingo.

By: Blueprint