If you’ve ever tried to convey a design idea to a prospective client or coworker, you know the importance of having a quality mood board. But sometimes, pulling together this type of visual presentation can be tedious or time-consuming.

With Material Bank, you can use LIVDEN patterns to effortlessly create a digital mood board, thanks to their latest feature: Material Desk. Material Desk is made with 21^st century designers in mind, and lets you easily pull together design inspiration online.

We've put an exclusive set of LIVDEN tile samples on Material Bank, so you can play around with our recycled tiles in Material Desk and get a better sense of how they'll live in your space. 

Discover how you can use this digital mood board to enhance your design process, below!

Digital Mood Board Made for Designers

If you haven’t heard of Material Bank, let us be the first to tell you: it’s incredible.

Material Bank is the world’s largest marketplace for the architecture and design industry, and the easiest tool for discovering and sampling new materials.

You can search from hundreds of brands (including LIVDEN!) and thousands of sample materials to find inspiration for your next project.

Find a sample you like? You can order your sample and have it delivered in a single box by 10:30AM the next day, for absolutely no cost.

Yes, you read that correctly: Material Bank is 100% free for design professionals.

Recently, Material Bank introduced a new feature, Material Desk, to further assist design professionals. Material Desk is a digital mood board creation tool that lets design professionals easily compile their material and visual inspiration for projects.

You can leverage their wide-ranging stock of materials and tie in your own personal elements to create a polished product that’s ready for sharing.

How to Create Your Digital Mood Board

To better understand how Material Desk works (and how awesome it is) we’re going to walk you through creating a digital mood board. Follow the steps below to get started!

Getting Set Up

Once you have signed up for Material Bank, you can select Material Desk from the navigation bar at the top of the home screen.

From there, you’ll be prompted to create a Palette, which is essentially an individual mood board that you can tie to a specific project.

All Palettes are automatically saved to your Material Bank account.

Enter your Palette and Project name and hit create to start browsing Material Bank’s myriad of materials.

Search Thousands of Sample Materials

Now it’s time for the fun stuff—browsing sample materials!

On your blank board, you can source materials through the top navigation bar. You can browse by:

• Material type
• Brands
• Search bar & keyword

After you have selected a material type or brand, you can further refine your search with the Filter bar. The Filter bar lets you specify what you’re looking for, and refine the available samples by:

• Commercial & Residential
• Brand
• Material
• Application
• Color
• Pattern
• Pattern Scale
• Construction
• Content
• Indoor & Outdoor
• Flammability
• Environmental Benefits
• Certificates & Standards
• Country of Origin
• Price Range
• Availability
• Collection
• Shape
• Dye Method
• Leather Specialty

We recommend playing around with these different search options to find what works best for you! 

All available materials will appear at the bottom of the digital mood board, where you can browse items by using the arrows to scroll right and left.

Want to add a sample to your board? Simply click on the item and it will be added directly on to the board.

Drag and Resize Materials as Needed

Alright, so now you have found the materials you want to use for your digital mood board. What’s next? It’s time to customize your vision!

You can rearrange the various samples by clicking on the sample and dragging them around the screen to your desired location.

To resize a sample, simply hover over the edges of the sample to reveal the resize cursor. Once revealed, you can drag the cursor to resize the sample as small or as large as you want in each direction.

You can also click on the sample to reveal more actions.

After clicking on the sample, a few action buttons are revealed. These buttons let you:

• Get more information about the sample
• Zoom or move the sample
• Delete the sample
• Set the sample as the background
• Send the sample a layer back
• Reset the sample to its original dimensions

This part of the process is all about creativity! Experiment with your samples until you find the look that’s just right for your digital mood board.

Add Your Own Images Easily

Maybe you have an image or a personal design file that you want to incorporate into your mood board. Not to worry! Material Desk has you covered.

On the right-hand side of the screen, there are several yellow action buttons. The top button is for uploading media. Clicking on that button allows you to drag and drop pictures from your computer into your mood board, or upload files directly from your computer.

Here we’ve added an art inspiration image to incorporate a personal touch into our digital mood board.

Create a Customized Background

With Material Desk, you also have the option to add a customized background for your digital mood board. You can create a customized background through two different options.

One way is by using the right-hand set of yellow action buttons. The second button from the top allows you to customize your background. There, you can choose from a set of background options, or select a custom color for your background.

You can also use one of your board’s samples to create a customized background. Simply click on the sample and select the action to set the sample as the background.

In the picture above, we used our Origami Cylinder tile in the color Dragon Fruit to create a dramatic background for our board.

Share Your Digital Mood Board with Others

So, you’ve put the finishing touches on your digital mood board, and you’re ready to share your creation with the world. Let’s talk about how to share or download your board.

At the top of your screen, you’ll see options to share or download your digital mood board. If you click the share option, you’ll see a new screen pop up where you can specify who you want to share your board with.

You can share your digital mood board with up to four recipients and can write a personalized message to go along with your board.

If you prefer to download your digital mood board directly to your device, choose the download option from the top navigation menu.

When downloading your mood board, you can select from the following image sizes:

• Full Image
• 1:1
• 9:16
• 16:9

These options are great if you want to re-share your creation on Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

Get Your Samples Overnight

Loving your final look? You can order samples directly from your digital mood board! Any samples ordered will be delivered to you next day, at no cost.

At the top of the screen, next to the share and download options, there is an option to order samples. You can choose to order all samples from your creation, or a certain set of samples.

With that, you’ve successfully learned how to create your very own digital mood board with Material Desk. We’re so excited to share this new feature of Material Bank with you and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

LIVDEN at Material Bank

At Material Bank, we have an exclusive range of samples from our curated line of recycled, decorative tiles. Explore our Material Bank tile samples, order samples at no cost to you, and discover how LIVDEN tiles light up your living space.

Still trying to figure out your unique tile style? Take our Style Quiz today! With this quick quiz you can easily figure out which design aesthetic suits you and find LIVDEN designs that complement your individual style.