What Actually Belongs on a Concept Board

Most concept boards are built to be admired, not read

A concept board gets assembled the night before the presentation, arranged for balance, and walked through in a conference room while everyone nods. It's a persuasion object. It exists to move a client from uncertain to comfortable.

That's a legitimate job. It's just not the same job as learning something.

A board built to be tested is arranged differently, because it has to survive contact with people who have no context, no relationship with the designer, and no reason to be polite. Those people can't tell you whether a layout is well crafted. They can tell you, fast and without thinking about it, what a texture or a color or a letterform makes them feel. That's the raw signal, and it only shows up if the board is made of raw material.

Clients think in complete pictures. Designers think in elements.

This is the split that determines what goes on the board.

A client sees a finished brand and reacts to the whole thing at once. A designer sees the parts: the weight of the type, the way a form repeats, the temperature of a color, the grain of a texture. The designer's job is to recombine those parts into something that doesn't exist yet.

So the board should carry the parts:

• Line. Weight, direction, quality, how much of it there is.
• Form. Shape language, geometry versus organic, density.
• Texture. Surface, grain, material, how physical or clean it reads.
• Color. Palettes and relationships, not single swatches floating alone.
• Type. Letterforms and pairings, at a size where the character is visible.

Figure 1 · The raw material

Two boards of twelve images is a workable start. Three or four boards gives you a truer sample on a big-picture question like a brand. You can also cross boards deliberately, so the audience has to choose within a category rather than across everything at once. One board for color and texture. One for typography. One for photography. How far you split it depends on how much detail you need out of the test.

Figure 2 · Two ways to structure it

What doesn't belong, and why it costs you

Four things show up on boards constantly and take value off the table every time.

Complete logos

A logo is somebody else's finished answer to somebody else's problem. Put it on the board and you learn that people recognize a good logo, which you already knew. If the mark itself is the open question, test its elements rather than the finished thing.

Full layouts

Same problem, more moving parts. Nobody can tell you which of the fifteen decisions in a layout they're responding to, including the person who responded.

Anything too small to see

If an image has to be shrunk past the point where its texture or letterforms are legible at board size, it isn't in the test. It's decoration.

Other people's completed ideas

This is the expensive one. It's multiple complex elements in a specific arrangement, and when the audience picks it, you don't know what they picked. You also inherit a real risk, because building a direction out of somebody else's finished work walks toward copyright and trademark problems that surface long after the board is forgotten.

Figure 3 · What comes back

The board that sells and the board that learns can be the same board

There's a version of this where a board assembled for a client and a board assembled for an audience are opposites. That's not quite right. They can be the same object, and often should be.

If a designer has a real understanding of the business, the market, and the audience, and builds a board out of what the stakeholders have told them, that board is a distillation of professional intuition into a set of testable bets. Test it. If it comes back contested, with no clear pattern anywhere, you can go back to the stakeholder and say this wasn't clear to anyone we showed it to, so let's take another pass. That conversation is much easier to have with a heat map than with an opinion.

The board that has stopped being useful is the one that looks like the competition, or the one the client assembled themselves. A lot of agencies ask the client to go find websites they like or build a pin board. That's asking the client to supply the source material and then paying a designer to replicate what the client already likes. It skips the expertise the client hired.

The better sequence is that the designer asks pertinent business questions, works to understand the market, the service, and the audience, then does what they're trained to do and builds boards out of design elements they can test with real people.

How the board gets built on a real project

The process behind a good board is mostly research, and most of it happens before any image is chosen.

1. Start with the business. Roughly twenty-one questions about the market, the offering, the audience, the audience's pain points, and the pain points the company has internally. What matters to their employees. Their partners, their competition, how they win and lose.
2. Learn the industry, not just the brand. Designers are fluent in branding, marketing, and design. They usually aren't fluent in the specific market their client lives in every day. Two deep wells of knowledge, and shallow, vague language between them. Closing that gap is most of the work. It's also why niche agencies do well, since they've already learned the language, though even then you still have to learn the specific client.
3. Apply the design expertise to what you learned. Look for imagery that will do the job of carrying the right message to the right audience.
4. Build the boards. Two dozen to four dozen elements, organized so a pattern can emerge.
5. Test the hypothesis with a real audience. Hundreds of people, sometimes thousands. See what scores high and what scores low.

What you get to say at the end of that is the part worth the effort: here is what I learned about your company, here is my design expertise applied to it, here were my two dozen to four dozen ideas, and here is what your actual audience responded to.

That's a different conversation than defending taste.

Frequently asked questions