How to create a personal style vision board

Have you ever wondered how to create your own personal style? The first step is creating a vision board. Being able to visualise what inspires you is so motivating, as well as reminding yourself what’s important and what makes you look and feel good. This is a very creative and practical task, I recommend you create this this physically rather than digitally. However, you can replicate all these steps online via Pinterest or Photoshop.

5 Steps to create your own personal style vision board

Step 1 – Capture what inspires you

Collect images of things that inspire you, it can be nature, architecture, hobbies. Tear out pages from magazines. Print images from your photo archive. Be creative and look ‘everywhere’ and save all the visual elements that inspire you. This can include swatches of materials, colour combinations.

Collect everything into a shoebox and store ready for later.

Step 2 – List your values

Log onto your computer or take our your sketchbook and paints. List out the top 10 things that you care about in the world. This is what we call our personal values list.

For example: 

1. Shop Local – supporting local designers 
2. Animal welfare – wearing cruelty free 
3. Protecting our planet – supporting brands that use sustainable processes and materials 
4. Preserving skills and crafts – choosing handcrafted or bespoke clothing over mass-produced ones 

Select the keywords that resonate with you most and create some beautiful word-art or create some icons that represent them. 

Instead of creating all 10 focus on your top 3 values (as its almost impossible to hit all 10 at the same time) so consider adding more values to your board over time, once you’ve integrated the top 3 into your life and you are living and wearing them effortlessly.

Step 3 – Collect any cool quotes or tips 

If you’ve been given any cool advice, like don’t shop for things unless you know it’ll see  #100wears and can be #Styled5ways and to consider the #CostPerWear #WearYourValues 

Pinterest is a great source for finding empowering quotes – select a few that really motivate you.

You can easily create these quotes in a style you like, in tools like Snappa.ai (which I love to use) or Canva, then print them out so they are ready to go into your ideas box.  I recommend printing in several sizes. 

Step 4 – Start to create your looks

Start to layout your ideas on the table in front of you, or pin to a wall and start assembling a visual representation that inspires you.  Take photos of your layouts and keep tweaking the format until you find something that you really like.  I recommend clearing a space in the middle to have a ‘key image’ of yourself wearing an outfit that makes you feel good about yourself, one that is powerful, and reflects the values you want to live by. 

If you are struggling to find the image of ‘you’ find a picture of someone else with a style you want to emulate, simply cover their head with a picture of yours – so you see yourself when you look at the board. 

Step 5 – Get creating!

Put on some inspiring music. Start to glue everything onto the board.
Taking care to refer to your snapshots if you want to create something that goes up on the wall (and you are a bit of a perfectionist when it come to things you want to hand on the wall – don’t glue anything down until you feel confident it to look goods).  Or live on the wild side and just go with your creative instinct – just stick and position things where you feel it works best in the moment. Its is meant to be creative after all, so enjoy and do what feels best for you.   

When you’ve finished you can add your new montage to a frame.  Then hang in a place that you will look at every day for inspiration and to guide you and remind you.

Personal style vision board shopping & prep list

• I like A1 poster frames, such as this A1 frame by John Lewis which comes in white, black or wood.  The benefit of these frames is that they come with a large sheet of paper that you can pull out, turn back to front and use as the ‘board’. 
• Colourful card or paper (or find scraps some from around your home) 
• Paints 
• Collect flowers or greenery from the garden to ‘press’ if florals and nature are your inspiration, check out this blog on pressing flowers. 
• Scissors 
• Glue (something simple like Pritt Stick is fine)
• A couple of fashion magazines (in case you need glossy images for your board) 
• Printer cartridge + paper

Any material swatches that inspire you (you can order swatches for free or for a small fee from multiple online retailers). I recommend Offset Warehouse who sell swatches for £1

Need some style inspiration?

Check out my Top 10 Style Tips – you can download and print the tips and use on your board

Check out my Pinterest – take a look at the different styles and colour combinations on my boards.

Thanks for reading and I hope this has inspired you.

Roberta x