Building a mood board

Boards are a freeform visual canvas per project — build a mood board from your room items, uploaded images, text, and colour swatches, right inside Mortar.

Creating a board

1. From a project, click Boards in the left nav.
2. Click New Board, give it a name, and optionally link it to a specific room (leave it unset for a whole-project board).
3. Or, if the project has a room with priced items and no board yet, you may see a "Would you like us to generate a mood board?" prompt right on the Boards page — pick a room and click Generate board to get a first-pass layout automatically instead of starting from a blank canvas. Its swatch strip is sampled from the actual product photos being placed, not a generic palette, so the colours on a generated board match the room. See AI-generated mood boards for what this does and how to ask for one from the chat assistant instead.

Adding things to the board

The side panel has three sections:

• Products — search your project's items and click (or drag) one onto the canvas. Only items with a photo can be placed.
• Elements — add a Text block, a colour Swatch, or an Arrow. Use the Eyedropper tool here to sample a colour directly from any photo already on the board — arm it, click the image you want to sample, and a new colour swatch is added next to it. It disarms automatically after one pick, or press Esc to cancel.
• Images — drop a file (PNG, JPEG, WEBP, GIF, or AVIF) or paste an image URL. SVGs aren't supported, from either an upload or a URL.

An externally-linked image is automatically re-hosted into Mortar's own storage the first time you place it — it's never left hotlinked to the original site.

A board holds up to 200 elements.

Arranging the canvas

• Drag an element to move it; drag a corner handle to resize (aspect stays locked).
• Snap guides appear against the canvas centre/thirds and other elements as you drag — hold Alt to temporarily disable snapping.
• Right-click (or use the toolbar) to duplicate, lock, delete, or reorder an element's stacking (bring to front / send to back).
• With an element selected, use the arrow keys to nudge its position.
• Right-click an image or product photo and choose Make hero to scale it up and reposition it as the board's focal point, sized relative to the other images already placed.

Background colour and removing backgrounds

• Use the background control to set the canvas's background colour. Alongside flat colours, four textured backgrounds are available — Warm paper, Linen, Soft plaster, and Dark charcoal — for a more tactile board surface. Pick one from the same background control.
• On an image or product photo, use Remove background to cut it out — this is AI-generated, so results vary by photo; if it's not right, Restore background puts the original image back at any time.

Adding shadows to product photos

Select an image or product-photo element on the canvas, then use the Shadow control to choose Drop (soft ambient shadow), Cast (shadow thrown to one side, as if lit from an angle), or Ground (a shadow puddle beneath the item, as if it's resting on a surface) — or None to turn it off. Once a preset is chosen, use the blur, opacity, and light-angle sliders to fine-tune it. Shadows show up the same way in the client portal and in the tearsheet PDF export.

Removing an image's background automatically adds a subtle grounding shadow the first time, so a fresh cutout doesn't look like it's floating — you can change or remove it afterwards at any time, and Mortar will never re-apply or overwrite a shadow you've already set.

Saving

Boards autosave roughly 800ms after each change. A status indicator shows Saved, Saving…, or Save failed (edits retry automatically on your next change). If you see a Conflict notice — someone else edited the same board elsewhere — your conflicting change was not applied; reload the page to pick up the latest saved version and redo what you needed to change. Nothing is ever silently overwritten.

Sharing with a client

Toggle a board from Draft to Shared to make it visible in the client portal — see Approvals for what a client can do with a shared board, and The client portal for the broader sharing model. A live budget bar on the canvas totals the priced items currently placed on the board (each item counted once; drafts, declined, and unselected alternatives are excluded — same rule as room budgets). When every priced item on the board belongs to a single room, the bar compares against that room's budget; otherwise it just shows a running total.

Unsharing a board revokes client access immediately.

Exporting a tearsheet PDF

Click Download tearsheet to export the board as an A4-landscape PDF: page one is the board exactly as arranged on the canvas (positions, rotation, stacking order preserved), followed by an auto-generated product list of every distinct item on the board. Only images already hosted in Mortar's storage make it into the export — if you just finished editing, give autosave a few seconds to catch up before exporting.

The download always includes prices. Very large boards or oversized images can cause an export to fail outright rather than produce a partial PDF — if that happens, check your image count and sizes first.

FAQ

Why was my image rejected? SVG isn't supported for board images — use JPG, PNG, WEBP, GIF, or AVIF.

I got a "Conflict" message — did I lose my edit? No. The save was never silently overwritten. Reload the page to see the latest saved version; your conflicting change wasn't applied and needs to be redone.

Can two people edit the same board at once? Not concurrently in real time — the conflict protection above stops one editor's save from silently clobbering another's.

Does the exported PDF hide prices? Not currently — the export you get from the editor always includes prices.

Why does my cut-out product already have a shadow? Removing a background automatically adds a light "Ground" shadow so the item doesn't look like it's floating. Change the preset or set it to None from the Shadow control if you don't want it.

Can I add a shadow to text or a swatch? No — shadows apply to images and product photos only.

Does the shadow show up in the exported PDF / client portal? Yes, it renders the same everywhere the board is shown.