Explore the concept of material boards, their importance in design communication, and different approaches to creating them, both physically and digitally. Learn how they allow designers to propose and explore a variety of materials, color palettes, and fixtures, serving as an essential tool in the design process.
Key Insights
- Material boards, also known as FF&E boards or mood boards, are used to convey design concepts, potential materials, and inspiration to clients. They provide an opportunity to propose a range of options such as floor coverings, wall structures, paint, light fixtures, furniture, and fabrics.
- Material boards can be created both physically and digitally, each with its own advantages. Physical boards allow clients to touch and feel proposed materials, while digital material boards, created using platforms like PowerPoint, Photoshop, or Canva, offer practicality and sustainability without compromising the visual representation of the design concept.
- Material boards are vital in the design development process. They can undergo several iterations, progressively refined based on feedback and as the design concept evolves. They aid in the selection of the final set of materials and color palettes for the project.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
So there's elevations, sections, floor plans, and renderings. Now we're going to dive into material boards. Now there's a couple of different names for these, and a lot of these overlap.
So you may hear the traditional term material board, but you may also hear may hear FF&E boards, which is furniture, fixtures, and equipment boards. You may also hear the term mood boards, which gives us the idea of what we're going to do with the project as far as inspiration and how the concept's going to develop. And none of these, they're all different ways to approach the material board, and honestly all of them work together to show the client what's happening.
Now you think you have to think of material boards as an opportunity to communicate a number of different things to the client. Now the things that you show in this material board are obviously going to show up in the rendering or maybe in the elevation, right? Everything should be cohesive, but while you're exploring you may do a material board that looks at three different floor coverings, right? You may look at a couple of different variations of how you can create, you know, your wall structure or a wall covering. You may look at paint proposals, right? What colors can we work with the interior palette? Proposed ceiling fixtures, light fixtures, furniture selections, desired fabrics, all of this can be shown on a material board.
Plants, proposed greenery, design inspiration imagery, so this is where the mood board and the material board kind of start to overlap. And the great thing about this particular way of communicating drawing is you guys are going to do this for your next homework assignment. And so showing some of the sustainable features, showing the materials that you want to use, and the great thing is there are resources available to you.
So nowadays, you know, back in the day we always did material boards by hand. We would grab a piece of fabric, we would get a sample of the woodwork, we would get a sample of the glass that we're using, and we would physically build them together. And I'm going to show you examples of both.
Learn Interior Design
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
Now there are some great resources that allow you to select materials and do everything digitally. Motto board, materialbank.com, these are all great resources that you guys are welcome to check out. And the YouTube link on the bottom walks through the process of creating a material board, which might be useful for some of you as you dive into this next homework assignment.
So here's an example of a physical material board. You can see that there's a lot of different things being shown here, right? There is potentially the materials that we're using, the flooring, you know, the wall material. But also we're looking at hinges, right? We can see what the door hardware is going to look like.
We can see what the finish of surfaces is going to look like. And the great thing about material boards is it gives the client a chance to look and feel, like literally feel, what the material is going to represent, right? They can touch it, utilize their senses so they can understand if that's a material that best suits their needs, right? So material boards do help go beyond just the idea of presenting, where it allows kind of an opportunity for the client to not only see but touch the actual materials that are being considered for their project. And in the schematic phase, you may go through a variety of different materials until you figure out which one is the best, and that's okay.
As you get towards design development and construction documents, you will fine-tune it. There may be four variations of this material board in the beginning. And as you go through and you refine things, the client narrows it down and you narrow it down to one specific set of materials that you're going to use.
The other wonderful thing about material boards, it can give you an idea of what you're going to do with a color palette, right? Which tones do you want to use and why? Now this particular material board was created digitally, and believe it or not, you can do this in PowerPoint. So everyone likely knows how to add font or text to PowerPoint. So you can see the legend on the bottom left.
We could easily type that up in PowerPoint. And then what we can do is we can save images and bring in those images on PowerPoint to overlay them. And now you've got a digital material board, right? And the beautiful thing is, you know, there are so many great effects.
Now even PowerPoint, you can drop shadows to make it look realistic. You can take screenshots of different materials. But the wonderful thing is it allows us to understand, are we selecting the right materials? And is it in line with the design concept that we're going for, right? I definitely recommend having a legend, which calls out the materials.
Now here you can see there's a couple pieces of leather. There's aluminum. You know, there's a flooring material.
There's various ideas of what the finishes could look like. And so for your final project in this next assignment, you're going to actually create a material board. And we're going to do this digitally, and I'll explain the homework criteria in just a few minutes.
But just so you have an idea, material boards, if you want to be sustainable and not necessarily waste materials, you could potentially do this on PowerPoint, or on Photoshop, or on Canva. There's a variety of different ways to do it. But it can be done digitally, you know, and the digital material boards are becoming more and more popular for interior designers.
And if you check out the links that I have on the previous slide, I think you're going to find that those links will come in very handy. This is another example of a physical material board. Now this is an actual board that's created.
You can see the board has a backing. Usually it's what's called foam core, so it's a big thick sheet of foam. And then on top of that, you add all of the furnishings, the materials that you want to use in the project.
So you may want to include paint options, right? So you can see the color palette. Here the color palette is a very light shades, different shades of blue, right? You may include what the flooring material is, or what the wall material is going to be. You may actually pull in the bottom middle, you can see the blue fabrics.
You may actually find fabrics. Now the great thing about being an interior design student is you can virtually go to almost any place that sells products, right? And you can likely get free samples. So little tip is the next time you go to the flooring store, go in there and let them know you're taking interior design courses, and you're curious if they have any leftover samples that they wanted to recycle that you could pick up.
So a lot of times some of these materials you can find at a variety of different places. And so one place is just utilizing some of the local shops that sell flooring, or wall coverings, or rugs. And a lot of times there's samples that are given to students so that they can start to experiment with.
So and again, the other way to do it is just to do it digitally and say, all right, I've got a variety of different samples that I'm putting together. I'm going to put it on a digital board and we're going to see how it comes together. Okay, so in conclusion, there are a number of variety, there's a variety of different ways that we can use presentation techniques, right? We went over plans, we went over elevations, we went over sections, we looked at interior design renders, and we talked about how they can be used to develop the project that we are working on for the client.
And in the end, material boards play a very key role in developing the design of the project as well. So while you're designing, think about the variety of different ways that you can communicate to your client, including the material board, the elevation, the plan, and work through all of them together before you finalize your design concept. In the next video, I'll be going over your project three, which is a material board, as we discussed in this lesson.
Thank you. We'll see you then.
