Vintage Ice Cream Branding and Mood Board

One of my favorite parts about working on Your Brand on Mood Boards was creating a brand specifically for an example to use throughout the workshop. As someone who loves coming up with ideas, and never executing them, this is a dream project.

Only doing the fun, design parts? Hell yes! :)

I created a non-dairy ice cream brand called Sundae Scoopery. Non-dairy because I’m lactose intolerant and the “good” non-dairy ice cream options are still lacking. If you’ve shopped for these options lately you know what I’m talking about!

They want to stand out in a saturated market and using some different or unexpected inspiration sources will help. Keep reading to learn more about the branding and mood board process.

Keywords

It’s so tempting when working on a project, whether it’s for your brand or someone else, to just jump into Pinterest or your inspiration happy place and go wild.

Let’s rein in that enthusiasm just a stitch because we’ll get there eventually.

First we start with the words that we want to describe the brand and how we want people to feel after using or consuming the brand.

The words I came up with for Sundae Scoopery are: nostalgia, indulgence, and joy. I also used ChatGPT to brainstorm names for the brand because it usually comes up with a few good ones.

Gathering Inspiration

Next we’re gathering inspiration with intention and direction. I know it’s so fun to go off the rails but being slightly focused now will make editing and narrowing down our options much easier in the future.

One of my favorite images I found for this mood board is this cute, ice cream sundae illustration from a vintage ad. This little guy is kind of the perfect mix of all of my keywords.

Nostalgia because this is from a vintage ice cream ad. Indulgent because of the sundae with chocolate syrup and a cherry on top. Joy because his little face is radiating so much happiness.

Practicing what I preach doesn’t come easily but I like to pin all my inspiration to a dedicated board on Pinterest and then in the next phase narrowing down the options into a separate section.

This way you don’t “lose” any images you saved if they didn’t make the final cut. You can see this in the example below. The original board is called Vintage Ice Cream Mood Board and the narrowed down version is Sundae Scoopery Mood Board.

Editing and Refining

In this screenshot, you’ll see my narrowed down section just for Sundae Scoopery. It’s focused on three design examples, an illustration, a photo, and a logo.

I’m going to go through why each image works for this mood board and keywords.

We already went over the sundae illustration guy in the previous section, he’s still my favorite!

The next image, from left to right, is a photo taken outside a vintage ice cream parlor where 2 young women are eating ice cream cones while walking. I’m estimating this was taken in the 60s to 70s time period.

This image is heavy on the nostalgia aspect since it’s definitely not a modern picture and we can take inspiration from the warm, sepia tones and colors in their outfits and the background.

The logo and font style on the far right is also a great match for our brand keywords. This vintage style serif font works for the time period we’re referencing and the red is reminiscent of the cherry on top of a nice, indulgent sundae.

Assemble

Putting all of our elements and images that made the cut into a mood board is the final step.

You’ll see an example of a very clean and simple 9 grid layout mood board. My style is usually a bit more chaotic and looks more like a collage but I didn’t want to overwhelm you guys.

Next Steps

Now what? The next steps for creating the Sundae Scoopery brand would be finding a brand designer, hi I can do that :), or using these elements from the mood board to inform your choices for the branding elements you need.

This includes a logo, font choice, illustrations, and photos.

Using these design elements inspired by your mood board will help you create a cohesive brand across social media, a website, and email marketing.

Ready To Launch?

When you have your mood board and brand basics sorted out you can plug them into a website template and launch in a few days instead of a couple of weeks!

Sounds amazing, right? My Squarespace templates are the sweet spot between a DIY build and fully custom site.

Try launching without the overwhelm and check out the live demos and more in the Redesignia Template Shop.