Google’s latest Labs experiment, Mixboard, is finally here — and it wants to turn your stray ideas into fully visualized concept boards with the help of AI. The public beta, now available in the US, gives users a blank canvas that can be filled with images, text, and AI-generated visuals powered by Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model.
If it looks like a mood board and acts like a mood board
But it could also be AI slop
Credit: Chris Thomas via Mixboard
After one quick prompt, my “banana bread festival” mood board was complete. And it felt pointless.
Mixboard feels like a mashup of Pinterest, FigJam, and Adobe Firefly’s mood board feature — but with Google’s twist. You can start with a text prompt (say, “mid-century modern living room with a warm color palette”), pick from pre-populated boards, or upload your own images to build around. Once you’ve got a starting point, you can edit with natural language prompts, combine images, and even generate text based on what’s on the board. Google’s new Nano Banana image-editing model is also baked in, allowing quick adjustments like swapping colors or tweaking styles. If you don’t like what you see, one-click actions like “regenerate” or “more like this” let you spin the AI roulette wheel again.
It’s a slick experience, but it also raises a question: Is an AI-generated mood board really a mood board? Some critics argue that the process of hunting for inspiration is the point, not just the outcome. After all, according to people who make them, the purpose of a mood board is the act of searching out, collecting, and refining things that make you feel a certain way. Automating that step (using AI-generated images, no less) risks flattening the creative process into something more like a glorified Google Image Search result.
That tension might be exactly what Google is testing. Earlier this year, we reported on a rumored Pinterest-style feature that never made it to I/O, along with a new Images tab in the Google app designed to surface inspo-heavy search results. Mixboard looks like a natural extension of that work: part visual discovery engine, part creative tool.
Google is framing Mixboard as an “early experiment” rather than a finished product, and the company is inviting users to try it out and share feedback in a dedicated Discord community. It’s clear Google wants to see how people actually use this thing before deciding whether it’s a Labs curiosity or the seed of a bigger play in visual discovery.
Mixboard is live now at labs.google/mixboard, so you can try it out for yourself.
