no. 3 — My Copenhagen mood board

a new three-word method and creative experiment for your travels

A three-word method for travel

My husband and I have a travel tradition. Whenever we visit a country for the first time, we challenge ourselves to come up with exactly three words that capture our experience of it. And then we exchange our three words with each other on the last day of the trip. It’s so simple and yet it’s been a powerful tool for taking stock of and actually articulating how (and often how differently) we experience new things. The three word constraint, in particular, is a great forcing mechanism. It prompts us to think of a string of words that will in totality convey different aspects of the country — the landscape, the culture, the energy, etc.

Others have used a similar approach for describing your personal style, but I’ve found this sort of exercise works especially well in a travel context, where you are exposed to something for the first time (and with fewer biases), you have a finite period in which you can make your observations and reflections, and you get to walk away with a pretty nuanced “portrait” of your adventure.

My three words for Japan, for example: ceremonial, pristine, generous. And for Ireland: vast, cheeky, lyrical.

Last month, we had a chance to visit Copenhagen for the first time and we left in full agreement that it was one of our favorite cities in the world (an acclaim we do not make lightly). And my three words may help explain why it felt like my dream city:

Slick - a nod to all the sleek architecture and design materials, and also to the general “effortless cool” attitude of the locals we met.

Idyllic - the feeling of endlessly long summer days (18 hours of sunlight!), a myriad of swimming docks for your morning or evening dip, bikes whizzing by (without the Amsterdam aggression), and a general sense of order, peace and harmony of nature with the metropolitan.

Emerging - because it’s rare to find a non-major city become so well-recognized as a cultural center and at the forefront of food, art, fashion and design. It was a pervading sense that the Danish people have been onto something and that the rest of the world is just starting to catch on.

My Copenhagen mood board

I thought it might be interesting to try adapting our three word tradition into a visual challenge. so I made a mood board. And although this was a more expressly visual effort, the underlying approach is not unlike the one I’d take when analyzing trends in quantitative data. And it’s why I think exercising your pattern recognition muscles can serve you across so many areas of life.

For my Copenhagen board, I started laying out photos from my camera roll and other images of the areas I visited, looking for any common themes or styles that started to emerge. Once I had a sense of a few recurring elements, I’d edit and pare down the extraneous images until I was left with a mood board that felt cohesive and representative of what I witnessed firsthand.

In this case, a few distinct visual cues stood out pretty immediately.

First was a general color story of blue, white, and yellow with pops of red that kept repeating itself. (Not pictured above but it’s interesting that the homes on the iconic Nyhavn canal mirror the same palette.) And importantly, I kept seeing these as color-blocked solids rather than gradients. The juxtaposition of such rich hues side-by-side contributed to the “slick” design I referenced earlier and is also prototypical of the renowned contemporary Danish furniture brand Hay.

Second was the prevalence of sinuous lines and curved edges. See above the wooden bench in the atrium of the Louisiana Museum, the curves of the Kalvebod Waves surrounding the harbor-front and adorning Superkilen park, the handmade porcelain vase from an incredible ceramics shop called Karamiker Inge Vincents, and the blue and yellow line art on display at The Finn Juhl House. Copenhagen was all contours and no corners. I even looked at the logo typefaces of places we explored (lille bakery, Baka d’ Busk, La Banchina, Pompette pictured above) — not a serif font in sight!

And lastly, there was an embrace of natural elements in structural design. This was most clearly expressed in the way architecture engaged with and extended into the waterfront (the open-air contemporary dance performances at Ofelia Plads Harbour and again Louisiana museum, the GOAT of museums), but I also perceived this in the use of raw organic materials across interior and material design (the display shelves and woven crochet set of By Malene Birger, the aforementioned porcelain vase, the concrete service counter at Yaffa). In my view, all the natural elements worked together to give an impression that was warm, approachable and again effortless.

…. But what do you think? Can you see these patterns too? Would you be interested in seeing my mood boards on other countries?

And if you’re heading off to anywhere new, I hope you try out these creative experiments yourself. Would love to hear and see what you come up with!

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