Ledavio Mood Boards Help

Add agency logo

By clicking on the striked out camera symbol in the upper left corner, you can add your own agency logo, which is always visible, even if boards are made accessible to customers or several people work together live on one board.

Customer management

Click on “Add Costumer” to create a customer.

Enter customer name. The URL of a logo graphic can be inserted in the logo field, but the field can be left blank. You can also create several customers

Add a project to a customer

To create a project for the customer (necessary, otherwise no moodboards can be created), simply click on the “+”. You can also create several projects for each customer.

Add a moodboard to a project

o create moodboards for a project, click on the project name. The moodboard list is empty at the beginning. To create a board, simply click on the button “Add Moodboard”. As for the customer and project, enter a board name here. Just leave the logo blank; small thumbnails from the board will be inserted later automatically.

Open Mood Board

To edit a board, click on the board name (“Futuristic” here in the example).

Moodboard Editor

The title bar is located at the top and the toolbar at the left margin. The grey area is the endless board canvas. At the bottom left there is a feedback function with which you can send us errors and hints.

Toolbar

Most functions can be called from the toolbar. Check out the following list for the individual tools.

Context Toolbar

If you select one or multiple objects the context toolbar is displayed above the mood board canvas. For example, the functions for changing the layer order of the objects or aligment of objects are accessible via this toolbar.

Insert images onto mood boards

Image search

With the image search you can search for images by term in multiple sources at the same time. Simply enter a term in the “Search” field, select your desired image provider and click on “Search”.

Add images from the search results directly to your mood boards

Some image sources provide the possibility to filter the results by the dominant color. Just click on a color field to select your desired primary color for the image search. If you want to search for all colors just reset the filter by using the “Reset Filter” button.
Note: If you select a color in the section “Filter images by color” some images sources are disabled since they don’t allow color filtering

Filter images by color

If you move the mouse pointer over an image in the search result list, a “+” sign appears. If you click on it, the picture will be added to the moodboard in background. So you can collect your pictures first. When you are finished you can click the “OK” button to get back to your mood board. You will see your selected images stacked on the board in the upper left corner.

In the preselected mode the image results are grouped by the image source. Only one row per image source is displayed, at first. If you want to see more images from a specific source, you can click “Show more images”. If you want to hide the additional results, just click on “Reduce to one row”

Uploading images

There are two ways of uploading images. The obvious one is to use the “Select & Add” button in the Upload file section of the “Add New Image” window.

Upload by drag’n’drop

In Firefox, Safari Chrome it is possible to drag and drop images from the Finder (macOS) or Explorer (Windows) onto the board open in the browser (PNG, GIF and JPEG). The message “Uploading…” appears at the bottom right. Depending on the image size it could take some time until the image is showed on the mood board. So be patient.

Insert icons onto mood boards

Like images, Ledavio offers an integrated icon search. Just open the search window by clicking on the “Add icons” tool in the toolbar. Currently, we are using the Noun Project as an icon source.

Enter a keyword in the search field and press search (or press <enter>). To add icons to your mood board click onto the desired icons. It will be added in the background to the board’s canvas. You can select as many icons as you like.

Add a note

Use the note tool to add a note. In the “Add text” dialog box you can select the text, the font size (at least 40 is recommended), the font style and the appearance “Handwriting” or “Print letters”.

Notes can be edited by double-clicking on the text. When moving the mouse over it, the Settings button appears in the upper left corner and the Delete button in the upper right corner. The note can also be moved.

Add one-liner text

Use the font selection

When selecting fonts, a few predefined fonts are displayed. You can also upload your own fonts using the “Upload” button. But it becomes especially interesting when you click on “Browse”. By clicking the Monotype® hint screen opens. Simply click on “OK. Show me the fonts”. No Monotype® account is required within Ledavio.

The fonts are categorized (“New & Nice”, “Sans”, “Serif”, “Slab”, “Script”) and can be searched visually. However, you can also search by name. Click on the font name to select the font.

After selecting a font family the font style can be selected (this could take a bit, since the styles have to be loaded).

Font color

The colors can be selected either by the gradations of the primary and secondary colors, colors already used (“Save colors”) or an HSL/HSB color selector (“Advanced”). It is always necessary to click on “Select” to activate the color.

Choose a font color with the HSL/HSB color selector

Once you have set the desired color, click with the mouse in the “Preview” area below to select and activate the color.

Edit text

Double-click on the text to edit it.

Add a flow-text frame

The flow text tool can be used to insert multi-line text frames. All fonts in the Monotype web font library are available here as well. In addition, Lorem-Ipsum blind text can be inserted. Alternatively, you can enter content in the “Text” field.

When selecting fonts, a few predefined fonts are displayed. You can also upload your own fonts using the “Upload” button. But it becomes especially interesting when you click on “Browse”. By clicking the Monotype® hint screen opens. Simply click on “OK. Show me the fonts”. No Monotype® account is required within Ledavio.

The fonts are categorized (“New & Nice”, “Sans”, “Serif”, “Slab”, “Script”) and can be searched visually. However, you can also search by name. Click on the font name to select the font.

After selecting a font family the font style can be selected (this could take a bit, since the styles have to be loaded).

Change flow text properties

If you move the mouse over a text field (text line or continuous text), a gear appears at the top left. Click on it to open the properties of the text field.

Auto-arrange objects in a grid

If you want to arrange your objects in a grid on the mood board, the “Grid-Layout-Tool” can help you. Click the tool in the tool-bar and choose a number of grid columns. After clicking on “OK” the board objects are placed automatically in a grid.

Zoom

The view can be zoomed using the zoom tool (magnifier). The tool options are displayed at the top of the title bar: enlarge (+), reduce (-), original size of images/100% (magnifying glass with arrow) or total view of all objects (eye symbol).

Share board for viewing

To show the board remotely to customers or colleagues, for example, the board can be shared via URL. Activate the “Share board” checkbox and pass on the displayed URL and password (the password can be changed).

Export Board as PDF

The whole board can be exported as PDF. Simply select the paper size and orientation. The PDF is generated by clicking on OK and offered for download.

Please note: In the free plan this export only available as one big bitmap image embedded in the pdf. The pro plan will support PDF with each board object exported as separate object in the PDF.

Moodboard settings

In this dialog you can set the background color and the output settings for the PDF export. “Enable guided lines” displays the page margins for the individual pages of the PDF when exporting to the moodboard. The background color is used for viewing in the browser and the export.

You can choose the paper format the moodboard is exported to. The selecteable sizes range from DIN A0 to DIN A5 and the orientation can be “Portrait” or “Landscape”.

Select background color of a mood board

Either enter the color value as a hexadecimal RGB code or click on the color field on the right to call up the color selector. Colors can be selected via the three tabs “Basic Colors”, “Saved Colors” or “Advanced” (HLS/HSB). Don’t forget to click on “Select”!

Main mood board canvas functions

Select objects

To select an object, just click on it ?.
Select multiple objects by holding the -key while clicking (as you are used to in many applications). After selecting objects a toolbar is displayed in the title bar at the top.

Arrange objects

In the toolbar displayed above (select one or more objects), the functions for changing the order in the layer hierarchy of the objects (one to the front/back, to the background, to the foreground) are located in the left half.

Align objects to each other

If several objects are selected, they can be aligned (at the left edge, right edge, top edge or bottom edge) using the tools in the title bar (right half).

Delete objects

You can delete selected objects from your mood board by pressing the <delete>-key

Move and rotate objects

If you grab the object(s) inside, it/they can be dragged and moved. When you are moving objects you will recognize the smart guides which help you aligning objects to one another. Tip: If you want to disable smart guides go to the settings menu (page icon with gear wheel in the tool bar) and disable “Enable guided lines”)
If you want to automatically order your objects in a grid you can use the “Grid Layout” tool from the toolbar

To rotate move the mouse cursor just a bit over one of the corners of an objects. The mouse pointer will change into a rotation icon and by clicking and dragging with the mouse you can rotate the object freely.

Scale and crop objects

If you move the mouse over one of an object’s corners, it can be scaled.
The object can be cropped by pressing the -key and dragging at the corners. Right now, it’s only possible to scale or crop one object at a time.

Useful keyboard shortcuts

With Cmd-C (macOS) or Ctrl-C (Windows) you can insert images from the clipboard (works only in Apple Safari and Google Chrome — mostly with images that were inserted into the clipboard in the browser).
With Cmd-Z (macOS) or Strg-Z (Windows) actions can be undone.