Case Study: Alex's Campaign Mood Board — From Brief to Visual in 90 Minutes

The Brief

Alex had a 2pm client meeting. It was 11:30am.

The client was a direct-to-consumer athletic apparel brand — newer, positioned against established players on sustainability and authenticity rather than performance stats. The brief for the spring campaign was clear in tone but vague in execution: "real people, not athletes. Our customer is someone who works out because they like how it feels, not because they're training for anything. Active but not intense. Outside when possible. Our palette is earthy — nothing neon."

Alex had run dozens of these early-stage creative conversations and knew the dynamic: come in with nothing and spend ninety minutes talking about vague aesthetic concepts; come in with visual reference and spend ninety minutes actually making decisions. She wanted to arrive with a rough mood board that could anchor the conversation.

She had the time to try. She opened Midjourney.

Round 1: Orientation (20 minutes)

Alex started broad and fast, using high chaos to find visual directions rather than trying to nail anything specific.

Her initial prompt: /imagine active lifestyle photography, everyday people exercising outdoors, natural authentic moment, earthy colors, not posed --ar 16:9 --chaos 75 --v 6.1

The four results were a mixed bag. One looked like every other activewear brand: a suspiciously good-looking woman running on a beach with perfect lighting. One was interesting — a man in his 50s hiking through light fog, genuinely candid-feeling, muted green-gray tones. One missed the brief entirely (indoor gym, bright lights, too intense). One had promising light but obviously fake-looking posture.

She took the hiking image and used /describe to analyze it. Three of the four description prompts Midjourney returned included terms she found useful: "documentary photography," "morning mist," "authentic human moment," "shot on Fujifilm," "candid reportage style."

She had vocabulary now. She was not going to use the original image — she needed variety, not one direction — but the /describe exercise told her how to ask for more like it.

Round 2: Direction Finding (25 minutes)

With better vocabulary, Alex ran six rapid-fire prompts, each exploring a variation of the brief:

Prompt A: /imagine everyday adults jogging in an urban park, autumn morning, shot on Fujifilm X-T5, documentary candid style, muted warm earth tones, morning light through trees, no professional athletes --ar 3:2 --chaos 30

Prompt B: /imagine woman in her 30s doing yoga outdoors on a wooden deck, overcast soft light, authentically imperfect, not posed, minimal athletic wear, forest background, film photography aesthetic --ar 2:3 --chaos 20

Prompt C: /imagine group of friends on a trail walk, light hiking, casual athletic wear, afternoon golden light, candid documentary, laughing conversation, Pacific Northwest landscape, muted colors --ar 16:9 --chaos 40

Prompt D: /imagine close-up detail of running shoes on a trail, morning dew, earth tones, product photography meets documentary style, natural light --ar 1:1 --chaos 10

Prompt E: /imagine cyclist on a quiet city street early morning, fog, warm streetlight mixing with dawn light, solitary authentic moment, shot on Leica, journalistic style --ar 16:9 --chaos 20

Prompt F: /imagine diverse adults 30s-50s at outdoor farmers market in athletic wear, casual, real people lifestyle, warm morning light, authentic documentary --ar 16:9 --chaos 50

From 24 total images across these six prompts, Alex found five she genuinely liked. Not perfect, but visually consistent with the brief and good enough to anchor a creative conversation.

Problems she noted: - Prompt A: Two of four outputs included people whose hands were wrong — too many fingers, strange grips. She noted to crop tightly or avoid prominent hands. - Prompt B: The yoga image was good but felt slightly too "wellness brand" rather than "everyday athletic." One of the four variations was right; the other three drifted. - Prompt F: The farmers market image felt slightly random. Good concept, weak execution. One image was promising.

With five keeper images and seven promising near-misses, Alex shifted to refinement. She focused on three images she wanted to push further.

Refining the hiking image (from Round 1): She upscaled it first (U2 to get the best variation), then used Vary (Region) to fix a slightly odd background element that had caught her eye. She painted over the problematic area and re-prompted for natural forest background. Three attempts; the second was right.

Developing the trail walking group: She wanted to push the color palette more deliberately. She added --style raw to give her more control and refined the prompt: /imagine three friends trail walking in light woods, candid mid-conversation, muted sage and brown tones, autumn light dappled through canopy, imperfect authentic moment, no fitness model aesthetics, documentary photojournalism --ar 16:9 --style raw --chaos 15 --seed 4721. Using a seed here let her iterate on the color without recomposing from scratch.

Getting a close-up detail shot: The shoe detail from Prompt D had two good images in four. She upscaled both, noted which felt more "editorial/documentary" versus "product ad," and kept the one that felt more like found photography than staged.

Round 4: Curation and Presentation Prep (20 minutes)

Alex ended up with 12 images she was genuinely happy with and 6 more that were acceptable. She needed 10-12 for the mood board.

She pulled her favorites into Canva and arranged them in a two-row grid. She added three very short labels to indicate the visual themes: "Authentic Movement," "Real People in Real Light," "Outdoors as a Natural State." She added the brand palette swatches.

She did not pretend these were polished campaign images. The brief explanation in her notes was honest: "These are rough visual direction references generated in the past hour to anchor our conversation about the spring campaign look and feel." She has found clients respond better to this framing — it positions the mood board as thinking-in-progress rather than a finalized creative direction.

The Meeting

At 2pm, Alex pulled up the mood board on the conference room screen. The client team had three people: the founder, the marketing director, and a brand manager.

Within five minutes, they had a clear point of view. The founder immediately responded to the hiking/trail images — more outdoor texture and less urban running. The brand manager flagged that the diverse casting in the farmers market image was exactly right. The marketing director pushed back on one image that had crept toward too-aspirational: "This one still feels like we're trying to be Nike."

By 2:40, they had alignment on a visual direction that was clearer and more specific than anything the conversation could have produced without visual reference. The meeting became productive faster.

What Alex Learned From This Session

Chaos at the start, low chaos to refine. The high-chaos round produced unexpected visual directions she would not have thought to prompt for explicitly. Once she found a direction she liked, she dropped chaos to 10-20 to control variation.

/describe as vocabulary teacher. The most useful 5 minutes of the session was running /describe on the strongest first-round image and reading what Midjourney said about it. Three vocabulary terms she learned in those five minutes improved every subsequent prompt.

Round structure beats iterating one prompt. Running six different prompts in Round 2 and selecting from results was more efficient than iterating one prompt six times. Breadth first, then depth.

Hands need management. Any image featuring people with visible hands had a failure rate she estimated around 40-50%. Using --no hands helped but she also learned to structure prompts that avoided close-ups of hands, or to crop after the fact.

Aspect ratio from the start. She wasted two early prompts by generating in 1:1 and then wishing she had landscape format. Always set --ar based on intended use.

The 90-minute framing is realistic, not aspirational. She had estimated 90 minutes before starting and spent almost exactly that. If she had been more experienced with Midjourney's vocabulary, she might have done it in 60. If she had been less experienced, it would have taken longer.

The session converted a vague creative brief into a shared visual language that made the rest of the creative development process faster. That is the value proposition: not replacing the creative process, but compressing the early-stage visual exploration that traditionally requires either days of searching or expensive time with a professional creative director.

The actual campaign creative director came in after this session with a much clearer brief and significantly less open-ended exploration time billed.