Setting the mood board

How I'm panning for inspiration gold in the nearest magazine rack

On The Cusp is about becoming the next version of ourselves. That means experimenting with the breadth of our interests, exploring the depths of anything that captures our imagination, and learning to embrace uncertainty along the way.

Welcome! This is letter #57.

Summer breakfast, captured on Kodak Portra 400 film

Have you heard? Summer is when you should be eating peaches that are so ripe, you need to stand over a sink.

Summer, done correctly, means slowing down: spending languid evenings on a patio with friends, laughing and clinking glasses under a canopy of fairy lights. Stretching out poolside and getting lost in a novel. Limiting your fretting to the subject of how much zucchini your garden is producing (how will you ever use it all up?!).

But I made a wrong turn somewhere this summer, because the word “languid” has evaporated from my vocabulary.

My summer has been characterized by endless harried, unshowered trips to home improvement stores in an attempt to finish our DIY construction project before rainy season starts. It has also involved increasing levels of panic over the number of email responses and tasks I can’t find time to complete, plus attempts to balance visiting family with my daily responsibilities—leaving me feeling like I’ve failed on both fronts.

So my summer has involved a lot of things, but here’s one that’s gone MIA as of late: inspiration.

Let me stop you before you begin feeling sorry for me, which would be a mistake for many reasons. My stress this season is entirely self-imposed.

Still, my creative well has run dry, which begs the question: how do I refill it?

Writing and design rely, at least in part, on feeling somewhat jazzed about the projects in front of you. Creative work, of course, is still work—but when its genesis is entirely drained of inspiration, the end result is usually dull and flat. (Most readers and clients prefer “vivid” and “energizing.”)

Longer-term solutions exist for the inspiration problem, like Julia Cameron’s directive to write morning pages and take yourself on artist dates. But I’m looking for a quick fix here—basically, an espresso shot for my creative soul.

And while I’d usually start by choosing better—and fewer!—inputs, some moments just require gritting our teeth through a firehose of mediocre ones. (Exhibit A: my weekend spent in Home Depot’s fastener section, searching for concrete screws in the correct length and diameter.) I want a solution for the inevitable inspiration drought that works in less-than-ideal circumstances, too.

Enter: the mood board.

It had been decades since I considered buying a magazine for the sole purpose of cutting it up and arranging my favorite images on a bulletin board. Then I stumbled across

Lauren Marie

’s ode to the mood board:

How to Make a Mood Board

Lauren makes a compelling case for this super-accessible form of collage art. As she (correctly) asserts, “It’s simple, budget friendly, and endlessly inspiring.” Ding ding ding: the trifecta of attributes for any inspiration- and time-starved creative!

In an ideal world, I would’ve followed Lauren’s simple instructions for crafting my own canvas board. I’d already borrowed a staple gun from my neighbor for our catio buildout, and I was spending my days, nights, and weekends in stores that also sold particle board, foam insulation, and spray adhesive.

But the idea of taking on a second DIY project—even the world’s easiest one—took my nervous system directly into fight-or-flight mode, so I sheepishly bought one from Target instead. In making that purchase, I was betting that the images pinned to a mood board were more important than the board’s provenance from a factory assembly line overseas.

Also in an ideal world, I’d follow Lauren’s suggestions about where to find images to pin. And when life is less harried, I will! You know I love my Instax camera, and I can’t wait to snag a stack of used coffee table books for guilt-free slicing and dicing.

But this week, I settled for an armful of magazines purchased at Safeway as I made an emergency run for oatmeal. (Because recently, restocking breakfast supplies has taken a backseat to securing the aforementioned concrete screws.)

I asked the nearest Safeway employee if they carried magazines beyond the ones sitting in each checkout aisle; I didn’t think I’d find a creative epiphany in Us Weekly’s breathless anticipation of J. Lo and Ben’s impending divorce. She pointed me to the end of Aisle 10 with the caveat that their selection was, in her words, “very minimal.”

She was correct. While they did carry two publications entirely devoted to Taylor Swift and an arsenal of hunting-related titles (Western Hunting Journal, Guns & Ammo, Petersen’s Hunting, Firearms News, Backcountry Hunter, Backwoods Survival Guide, Precision Hunter, and Northwest Sportsman), there were precious few options I would’ve felt excited to select from the more extensive display racks at Barnes & Noble.

But beggars can’t be choosers, so I managed to scrounge up seven workable options. Sixty dollars and eighty-five cents later (note to self: start subscribing to magazines rather than buying them off the newsstand), I was on my way.

Predictably, I still felt too busy to get started. And then I remembered the old adage about meditation: “You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day. Unless you're too busy—then you should sit for an hour.”

So I sat for an hour, which was just enough time for my first mood board to come together.

Here’s what I learned:

• Pick a soundtrack. At first, it was hard to slow down and focus on the task at hand. Putting on some music—I chose Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism—helped me get into the groove.

• You don’t need to read your mood-board fodder. Though I did set aside Women’s Health for its interviews with my favorite Olympians!

• Flip before cutting. Skimming through the entire issue made it obvious which images were standouts.

• Themes emerge naturally. I wasn’t seeking a particular (cringe) aesthetic, just…stuff that called to me. Eventually, commonalities between the images emerged—but without any effort on my part.

• Use a variety of source materials. Different magazines have wildly different vibes, but I contain multitudes, too.

• Everything is fair game. I was inspired by editorial photo spreads—but also by advertisements, typography, colors, and phrases.

• When it comes to arranging the images, there are no rules. A mood board can be neat and orderly, chaotic, grouped by theme, or a complete free-for-all. It’s not a puzzle with one correct solution!

• Not everything has to fit. You can always save extra images for next time.

• IRL “layers” are more fun than digital ones. Do you know about the concept of “layers” in software programs like Photoshop, Figma, and Procreate? Basically, it’s a way of visually stacking digital items above and below each other. But analog layering is much more satisfying! (Just like it’s just more fun to “save” images on a pin board than it is to save them on Pinterest.)

• The result is temporary, and that’s part of the joy. When my current mood board starts feeling stale, or I’m feeling the itch to create something new, I won’t hesitate to make room for the next one.

Here’s the result:

It’s hanging in my office now, and when I glance over at the finished product, I do feel inspired.

But more inspiring than the result was the process itself, which required me to step away from my computer screen, slow my thoughts, concentrate on beautiful things for an uninterrupted stretch of time, and start taking small but concrete creative actions.

I stopped waiting to be graced by inspiration. I went out and found it at the end of Safeway’s Aisle 10.

Whether your creative work is a source of income or recreation, you might find something in this process, too. There are universal lessons we can take from any task that requires “breaking the seal” with a manageable first step, playing with our materials, and rearranging them until they come together.

And for those of you who, like me, are on the cusp of something new, it just might be the ritual we need to discover what our subconscious is calling forward.

Are you following along with my year of pizza on YouTube? Here’s the latest installment of the In Depth Cookbook Club! ⬇️

Step into my kitchen, where I’m making Bufalina’s Shrimp Pizza with Roasted Lemon Salsa (p. 49) and My Mother’s Horiatiki Salad (p. 51) from

Alexandra Stafford

’s wonderful cookbook Pizza Night.¹

As always, I’d love to hear from you. What inspires you in your least inspired moments?

Warmly,
Maddie

1. If you buy Pizza Night through my Bookshop.org affiliate link, you’ll be supporting this video series! That’s because each purchase made through the link earns me a small commission. All opinions are honest and entirely my own, regardless of affiliation.