The board belongs to the client
Inspiration usually arrives by email. The client finds a photograph late one evening and sends it over, and by the time it matters it is buried in a thread — separated from everything else they have sent, and from the words that explained what they liked about it.
The moodboard lives in the client’s own portal, on their project, next to the messages and the timeline. They pin photographs from their phone. They paste a link and it becomes a pinned image with its source kept. They can search a library of professional photography without leaving the board, pull a colour straight out of any pinned image — each swatch named, with companion colours suggested alongside it — or scribble directly over a photograph to say this bit, not that bit.
And here is the design decision we argued about longest: the studio cannot pin to it. The board holds only what the client chose. You watch it grow, you can reorder and tidy, and when you want to suggest something you send it in a message — where the client can add it to the board with one tap if it earns its place. A moodboard a studio can stuff full of its own catalogue stops being evidence of what the client wants; this one stays honest.
Because it is live-shared, there is no exporting and re-sending. The studio sees new pins as they land, and the client can share the board’s current state into the conversation whenever a decision needs making. Clients already send inspiration as messages — they always have — so the board is reachable from there too: anything sent in the conversation can be added to the board straight from the photo itself.
Commissions that end in a scheme, not an object
Vidual grew up around physical commissions — frames, suits, furniture — and its worksheet grew up around parts. But a large family of studios runs exactly the same shape of project with no bill of materials at all: an interior designer moving from site visit to boards to drafts to an approved scheme; an architect on a small residential job; a colour consultant whose deliverable is a set of decisions, beautifully argued.
Those studios were already running their projects over email. Now Vidual is first-class for them. A project can be a build or a service — you choose per project, and a service studio sets it once for the whole account. On a service project the worksheet leads with the money the way a consultant actually quotes it: a fixed fee, or hours against a day rate, with ancillaries alongside — not a parts list with the part left blank. The client’s portal follows suit and talks about fees, and the stock, ordering and point-of-sale corners of the app quietly step out of the way, because a colour consultant should never be asked about inventory.
The two modes mix. A framebuilder can run a fit consultation as a service project beside the builds; a design studio that occasionally makes the furniture it draws can flip one project the other way. Same timeline, same portal, same payments — the vocabulary follows the work.
Why they shipped together
A consultation runs on taste. The deliverable at the end — the scheme, the palette, the plan — is really a long argument about what the client responds to, and the evidence for that argument is scattered across saved posts, screenshots and forwarded links. The moodboard is where that evidence collects itself: by the time the studio sits down to draft, the client has already shown them the brief, in pictures and pinned colours, inside the project where the work happens.
It earns its keep on physical commissions just as well — a paint scheme for a frame, timber and finish for a table — which is why every project gets one, on every plan, like everything else in the pricing.
Both are live now. If you sell expertise rather than objects and you have been running it all over email, this is the moment Vidual became for you too — bring a real project into a 30-day trial, or spend half an hour on Zoom with Pete and see the portal your clients would get.