Anyone who has ever pieced together a mood board for that living room makeover or weekend party knows how time consuming it can get.
Google wants to change that. The company just pulled back the curtain on AI-based platform designed to simplify mood board creation and take direct aim at a popular Pinterest feature.
While seasoned Pinterest devotees have long relied on saved images and pins to build their collages, Mixboard brings in an entirely different method. All you need is a simple text prompt and Google’s artificial intelligence gets to work, conjuring up an instant mood board from scratch.
If you’re feeling a bit stuck, Mixboard even provides pre-made boards that you can tweak to fit your vision. No need to worry about finding the perfect photo before you start.
AI Tools Changing the Creative Landscape
Mixboard is available to users in the United States as part of a broader Google Labs beta program. Once inside, you can invite the AI to modify, combine, or even totally transform the images it created.
Powering this behind the scenes is Google’s new image editing engine, Nano Banana. This tech has quickly gained a reputation for producing edits that feel impressively realistic, and handling some complex creative requests with ease.
Nano Banana’s arrival isn’t just about making cool pictures. It’s almost a response to surging user appetite for smarter image generation and brainstorming assistants, especially among younger, visually driven groups.
Across social platforms, members of Gen Z have been showcasing their mood boards in creative videos. Pinterest itself capitalized on the moment by rolling out Shuffles, a separate app that went viral before Pinterest folded its capabilities back into the primary experience.
Other players, like creative startup Verse and now-defunct Landing, experimented with variants of AI mood board features. Depop also jumped in recently, offering its own visual tool to help sellers organize and present their style ideas.
Google’s pitch with Mixboard is partly about putting powerful AI into more hands but also about keeping up with this new wave of digital inspiration. Users can hit regenerate to see new concepts or ask the tool to run with any image that catches their eye.
For those who like words as much as visuals, Mixboard can suggest descriptive text to match the mood or style of the board.
Right now, U.S. users curious to experiment can access Mixboard through Google Labs, where a Discord community is also inviting feedback.
As Google builds out Mixboard, the stage is set for a new chapter in digital mood boards and the way people explore inspiration online.
