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Ever spent hours crafting a mood board… only for your client to say, “Can we make it feel more like Apple?”

And you’re back to square one. (It’s enough to make even seasoned creatives dread the task.)

Yep. Been there.

The traditional process takes 5 to 8 hours (at least). And still, you’re sent back with vague feedback.

What if AI could 10x your speed and your creative range?

In this post, I’ll show you how to build stunning, client-ready mood boards in just 15 minutes using AI. No fluff. Just a smarter workflow.

You’ll learn how to:

• Visualize ideas
• Rapidly generate concepts
• Compile professional mood boards

Let’s turn one of design’s most time-consuming tasks into one of its most energizing.

Create a Mood Board Using AI

Let’s summarize the workflow. It includes the following steps:

1. Analyze the brand
2. Conduct your research
3. Generate concepts using ChatGPT
4. Request for specific visual ideas
5. Create images with MidJourney
6. Generate product-design concepts
7. Compile Your mood board

Time to go deep into them one by one.

Step 1: Analyze The Brand

Choose the brand you want to approach. Also add a few other examples that you like.

For this exercise, I chose AG1, a brand I use and like for its simplicity and effectiveness. The goal here is to create ideas for social media campaigns for it.

Step 2: Conduct Your Research

I studied the website, its products, basic color palette, ingredients, and site layout. (I particularly like its green palette.)

Step 3: Generate Concepts Using ChatGPT

After my initial analysis, I open ChatGPT and pasted the below prompt template:

Here, I replaced [type of brand] with "Drink AG1". And I can list the brand values and themes, or I can simply replace it with AG1’s website link because ChatGPT can scan the web.

Once the platform finished its web search and created a basic mood board, I asked for photography style ideas to use for online ads, social media, website, or newsletter.

Step 4: Ask for Specific Visual Ideas

Now we start getting slightly advanced.

I pasted ChatGPT’s suggestion on Photography Style ideas again in the tool. Next, I asked for 5 different ideas on the topic. Here’s the prompt:

Here are three of them:

Pro Tip: At this point, I do not look for control or perfection; just generating a whole lot of ideas quickly.

Step 5: Create Images With MidJourney

The fun continues.

I took each of the descriptions ChatGPT offered and pasted them in MidJourney. (I also cleaned them up by removing headings like Scene, Visual Mood, Props, and so on).

Next, I set the aspect ratio (3:4 in this case for social media visuals) and started generating images.

These can be inspiration for building a mood board. I repeated the process for the remaining 4 suggestions.

Step 6: Generate Product Design Concepts

The next step was to ask for packaging-design ideas. Here is the image prompt (that you can again use as a template):

I got suggestions like:

I repeated the process by pasting the prompts from ChatGPT in MidJourney and got a ton of images.

Here are 2 of them, “a futuristic sculptured ceramic jar in matte white” and “a matte green rectangular box opened slightly with sachets inside.” (These were also ChatGPT’s suggestions.)

Step 7: Compile Your Mood Board

Finally, I can put together all the ideas I like and share them either with my team or my manager.

The aim is not to have a final-cut mood board within 15 minutes (although with practice, you could get to a level where it will be possible). It is to generate visual prototypes that help you and your team brainstorm ideas that leave your client in awe.

[Also Read: We Used AI to Build Our Brand: This is What We Learned (Hits and Misses)]

Bringing It All Together

There you have it. A mood board created in 15 minutes that could have taken up to 3 working days. This includes color schemes, design elements, and everything else.

Plus, you can play around as much as you want, like a child with crayons. No one to tell you it can’t be done; the only limits are your imagination.

Experiment and you will discover unique combinations, which, in turn, will make your visuals more compelling.

Try this workflow and let me know how it turns out for you. And if you have suggestions to improve this, do write back to me. I would love to learn from you.

Pro Tip #1: Maintain a digital dossier of campaigns and visuals that appeal to you. When you create mood boards, you can feed them to ChatGPT for inspiration.

Pro Tip #2: Apart from MidJourney, you can also use Ideogram for generating AI visuals.

Weekly Workflow: Telling Compelling Visual Stories

Diana is busy. So busy that she rarely gets up from her desk.

But that doesn't stop her from dreaming about traveling the world.

So last week, she set a challenge for herself: to send her AI avatar on an adventure to the 7 Wonders of The World 🌎

Here's how it turned out:

If you want to know how she did it (and how you can too), here is the workflow:

Step 1: Log in to consistentcharacter.ai

• Open the Prompt Easy and type a rough idea for your character.
• The app will turn it into a well-structured prompt for you.

Step 2: Generate your character

• Ensure your prompt covers all the important points.
• Once that's done, press Create Character.

Step 3: Create more variations

• Keep the description the same.
• Change the background to cover different locations.

Step 4: Download your images

• Now you’ve got your mini story and are ready to animate.

Step 5: Animate with Kling 2.0

• Log in to Kling’s latest version.
• Upload your images and watch them come to life.

"Having tested over 100 AI tools, this duo stands out as my top choice." — Diana Zdybel

What new experiment are you conducting with AI this week? Let us know by replying to this email.

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Talk soon,

Sachin and Diana

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