Google Mixboard Review: Is This The End of Pinterest?

Google is taking a direct shot at Pinterest with the release of a new tool called Google Mixboard. This AI concepting board allows users to not only generate ideas but to combine them, mix disparate elements, and visualize them together in a single workspace. It is a significant step forward for designers and creatives who want to move beyond static image searching into active, AI-assisted iteration.

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“It’s an AI concepting board which basically lets you try out different ideas, combine them together, and then see them all together in one spot.”

In this guide, we will walk through how to access Mixboard, how to utilize its powerful features for interior and exterior design, and whether it’s worth adding to your creative workflow.

How to Get Started with Google Mixboard

Accessing the tool is straightforward. Currently, Google Mixboard is available for free while it is in its beta phase, specifically for users in the US. You simply navigate to labs.google.com/mixboard or search for it on Google. Once you log in, you are greeted with a dashboard showing recent projects and examples to help you get started.

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To begin a fresh concept, you select “New Project.” The interface is a clean, infinite canvas that relies on natural language prompting. Unlike traditional search engines where you hunt for existing images, here you describe exactly what you need, and the AI generates it for you.

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Creating Interior Design Concepts

The core functionality revolves around prompting. For an interior design example, you might want to visualize a specific aesthetic. By entering a prompt, the system uses its underlying model (referred to here as Nano Banana) to generate a board full of related images in seconds.

design a living room in mid-century style

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The speed of generation is impressive. Within roughly ten seconds, Mixboard populates the canvas with a variety of furniture, textures, and room layouts that match the “mid-century” description. This eliminates the need to manually pin dozens of images from different websites; the inspiration is created on the fly.

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The Power of “Mixing”: Combining Elements

Where Mixboard truly differentiates itself from platforms like Pinterest is its intelligence. It isn’t just a collection of static images; you can interact with and modify them. For instance, if you find a chair you like but want to see it with a specific fabric pattern generated elsewhere on the board, you can select both items and instruct the AI to merge them.

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By selecting the chair and the fabric swatch, you can issue a command to revise the image:

add this pattern fabric to the chair

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The AI revises the image, wrapping the new fabric texture onto the geometry of the chair. This allows for rapid iteration and refinement of a design, preventing you from being “stuck” with the initial output. Once satisfied, you can even remove the background to create a clean PNG asset for presentations in Canva, PowerPoint, or other tools.

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Context-Aware Object Insertion

You can also mash up different objects into a scene. For example, taking a plant from one generation and placing it into a living room scene is as simple as selecting both and prompting the AI.

add the plant into this room

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While the scale isn’t always perfect on the first try, the AI demonstrates remarkable context awareness. When adding a lamp to a table, the system doesn’t just paste a 2D image; it attempts to match the perspective and lighting.

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In the example below, the AI actually rotated the camera position of the lamp. It converted a side-profile view of the lamp into a top-down aerial view to match the perspective of the table, even adding appropriate lighting interactions with the vase.

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Exterior Architecture Workflows

Mixboard is equally useful for exterior design. You can start a new project to brainstorm architectural concepts, such as a “modern house in the countryside.”

I'm designing a new modern house in the countryside. give me front elevation inspiration

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The tool provides a mood board of architectural styles, materials, and lighting conditions. Just like with interiors, you can modify specific images without needing to mash them with others. You can simply select a rendering and change the environmental context.

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For example, transforming a dusk shot into a daytime shot:

make this a sunny day

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Advanced Texture Application

For more complex architectural changes, you can apply specific building materials to parts of a structure. By selecting a stone texture node and a house rendering, you can instruct the AI to apply that material to a specific architectural element.

add the stone texture to the second floor

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The result is a surprisingly accurate application of the stone material to the designated area, maintaining the perspective and geometry of the house. It is recommended to use the “More like this” or “Copy” features to keep your original “Before” images intact while you iterate on the “After” versions.

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Generating Variations and Final Thoughts

If you need to explore a specific direction further, Mixboard can generate multiple variations of a single prompt or image at once. This helps in exploring different iterations of a promising design.

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However, the tool does have some maturing to do regarding organization. As you continue to generate variations and add nodes, the canvas can become cluttered and difficult to manage. A feature to auto-distribute or organize the nodes would be a welcome addition to the feature set.

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Despite the clutter, Google Mixboard represents a promising shift in how we approach digital mood boarding, moving from passive collection to active, AI-driven creation.