olioboard mood board creator

I read about the OlioBoard mood board creator this morning from decor8 and immediately went over there, signed up (for free -- I never sign up unless it's free), and started creating.

I think it's good for getting a general idea for decorating a space, but there were a few things I didn't like.

• I wish they had paint chips you could choose from (unless they do and I just couldn't find them). I love wallpaper, but I'm not going to put it everywhere.
• I wish they had more character pieces to choose instead of all the big box stuff. I suppose that could be both good and bad, but I just felt like no matter what mood board you create, it still wouldn't have as much interest as a mix of old and new items would have. The popular mood boards that were featured kinda looked like they were straight out of a catalogue.
• It would be nice to be able to crop things a little more precisely. Some items were grouped together and I liked one thing in the grouping, but I wasn't able to seperate it out cleanly.
• It also took forever to load the pages and the items. Unless forever was actually only 60 seconds. But 60 seconds in internet time is forever! -- No. Making the second room really did take forever. It took forever to load everything, so it took forever to make, and then I saved it, and it said it saved, but when I went to save a picture of it, it was all gone. All of it. Gone. I could have cried. (Again I have to remind myself: always ALWAYS take a screen shot. ALWAYS.) They must've been having technical difficulties, because the site went offline for a while. It's back now and loading much faster.

Otherwise, I think it'd be a fun resource to play around with when you want to get a feel for how you'd like a room to look. When things do load and show up, it's really easy to size and position them. It was nice to be able to arrange items exactly how I'd want them to appear in the room rather than just having a bunch of random stuff plopped on, picture-list style.

Here are a couple spaces I came up with in, oh, maybe about an hour and a half (not including loading time and hair-pulling time).

bedroom concept

It's not something I would necessarily put in my own house, but I like the overall feel of it.

 

porch concept

this feels so Greek to me. I didn't do it purposely, it just worked out that way. Specifically, I love that bench rocker. We really loved sitting in one we found at Walmart but design-wise, it was super ugly. This one's much nicer and they ship to Canada! (By the way, the art here is just a piece of framed wallpaper.)

Anyway, I've spent all day fiddling around with this website. It's a lot of fun to have this much creative design freedom. You should try it!