Moodboarding as a practice is maxed out. It’s become a nearly absurdist consumer hobby, and it’s part and parcel of our algorithmic reality, targeted yet vague. Similarly, slop can’t be meaningfully curated because there are too many actors, algorithms, and microtrends being expressed simultaneously, in too many automated iterations.

‘the moodboard effect’ of designers all pulling from the same online source

Originality won’t come from abandoning references altogether, but really from changing our relationship to them. Offline archives, personal collections, even fragments from outside the visual field, these are ways to disrupt the loop and make space for work that feels alive again. We shouldn’t put the appearance of a deck first, we should think a... See more