The modern design industry is more fast-paced than ever. From UI/UX and product design to fashion, branding, and interior design, there is a need for swift delivery and fresh ideas on demand. This is why AI moodboard tools like Canva AI, Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, and Foto are common and heavily in use by the industry that thrive in. With these tools, designers can generate entire moodboards in a few minutes, avoiding the long hours they would have spent hunting inspiration, sourcing images, assembling color palettes, and tinkering layouts.
AI moodboard tools are fast and convenient. But at what cost? There are growing concerns that creativity and uniqueness in color easily get compromised with AI. So, are these tools worth it if aesthetics are starting to get really similar across different brands?
Why Designers Are Turning to AI Moodboards
AI moodboard tools are essential to many creatives due to the gift of time and convenience that come with them. A product designer at a startup might be juggling four different projects where he has to lay out moodboards for each project. This could take days. But with AI, he can easily get them done as the long processes are reduced to a few clicks. Also, an interior designer preparing for an urgent pitch meeting with potential investors does not have to waste time digging through Pinterest boards or Architectural digest when she can log in to Midjourney, type in a prompt, and watch as a full moodboard comes out of it.
The spread-out benefits of AI moodboard tools are:
Saves Time
Speed is a valuable concept in the creative process and the biggest appeal of AI-powered moodboards. At crunch time, who wouldn’t rather input a few keywords and upload sample images and receive fully formed ideas in minutes rather than spend hours manually putting together inspiration from scattered references? The speed offered by AI moodboard tools can be all that is needed by freelancers juggling multiple designs and in-house teams under pressure to keep campaigns moving.
Faster Ideation and Project Delivery
AI moodboard tools help designers deal with the increasing pressure to deliver concepts quickly by helping them get to meaningful ideas faster to start with. For example, a UI/UX designer pitching a fintech dashboard can receive a visual scaffold within minutes of typing in “clean modern trust-driven interface with cobalt blues and soft shadows.” This way, the designer can cut through the noise and get closer to their client’s needs.
Helps Automate Repetitive Tasks
This is another aspect that makes AI moodboard tools valuable. Tools like Khroma help with color palette generation based on personal aesthetic preferences. A product designer working on three packaging prototypes can rely on AI to instantly suggest matching fonts, align visual grids, or generate background textures, hence freeing up cognitive load for higher-level design thinking and tasks.
Quicker Client Approvals and More Billable Projects
Presenting design directions early accelerates decision-making and builds client confidence. This, then leads to faster approvals, more projects and subsequently, more revenue. Afterall, high-quality work in less time is one of the best ways to open the door to more billable projects.
Accessibility
AI tools have leveled the playing field in design to a stage where junior or non-designers can also create professional-looking moodboards without any sort of formal training. With Adobe Express, Canva or Fotor, a small business owner or a fresher into design can get a beginner-friendly mood board design.
How AI Tools Accelerate Designer Turnaround
AI moodboard tools accelerate turnaround in design through:
o Automation of Mundane Tasks: AI handles the monotonous part of design like sourcing royalty-free images, creating layout grids, or pairing complementary colors. This frees designers from time-consuming grunt work and lets them focus on high-level tasks.
o Quick Image Searches: AI tools have access to vast databases to pull visuals from. So, they can easily and instantly create high-concept visuals that used to take designers hours to curate.
o Smart Color Pairings: Some AI moodboard tools like Khroma use machine learning to generate color palettes based on a designer’s taste or the general trend in design.
o Layout Suggestions: Some AI-powered platforms go as far as help structure the moodboard itself. Canva’s Magic Design, for example, automatically arranges elements into formats.
o Trend Awareness: AI pulls from live databases like social media, online galleries and design blogs. So, these tools bring up visuals and palettes that reflect what is trending in real time, thus helping brands stay relevant and keeping designers aligned with consumer tastes.
The Homogenization Problem: Are We All Using the Same Palette?
If you open five AI-generated moodboards from different brands, chances are you will find them oddly similar. There is something about some combinations of natural tones across unrelated industries like skincare and tech that feels too alike. For instance, a designer creating packaging for a skincare brand in Korea can get another variation of the same recommendation of sage green and beige given to a yoga studio in California. Why does this happen? Clearly, the stories and cultural identities of these brands are different, so why are their visual identities blurring together?
As mentioned earlier, AI leans on popular, trending colors from existing data as it is trained on data from the same sources like Pinterest, Behance and stock libraries. This has its benefits but there is the problem of color and design repetition across brands and industries, as pulling from datasets of existing designs can create a loop where a limited range of color combinations are reinforced. This is a huge problem, as research shows that colors can influence up to 90% of initial impressions.
Now, the algorithms don’t know the story of the brand you are working on. Similar to how AI companions personalize interactions based on trending and user prompts, other AI tools work with what’s popular, well-tagged, or frequently engaged with by the user. A character from Candy AI (an example of such AI companion platform) doesn’t intuit deeper narrative intent, they reflect patterns. That’s why, without added creative direction, these tools often surface visuals that echo the same aesthetic signals seen across unrelated brands. In the case of AI companions, it’s the personalities and traits you would expect from a certain character profile, more so since they’re here to indulge you (unless you’re being extra-rude). And this is how the loop begins. Trending designs influence AI, AI suggests those same trends to designers, and those designs become even more dominant, with clear patterns. As the cycle repeats itself and the less common color palettes get ignored, they eventually fall out of view.
The Danger in the Homogenization of Color Palettes
Limited Emotional Range
AI Moodboards with similar color schemes may reduce emotional range or storytelling potential. Using blush pink and light grey for a mental health awareness campaign might look pretty, but an actual designer would know that deeper colors would add the gravity and contrast the campaign needs.
Loss of Creative Intuition
Another danger here is that designers may stop experimenting and start unconsciously relying on AI preferences. Creative complacency is accepting an AI tool’s first suggestion without exploring bolder or more culturally resonant options.
Lack of Distinctiveness Among Brands
If designers are not careful, brands can become indistinguishable in already crowded digital spaces. A business world where websites are looking visually look the same due to shared AI suggestions is harmful especially for emerging brands who need to stand out.
Cultural Erosion
AI is usually trained on Western-centric data. Hence, it tends to neglect the aesthetics and color leanings of other regions. Without manual input, it is hard for designers from places like South Asia or Africa to find AI outputs that reflect their cultural aesthetics.
How Designers Can Achieve Originality Alongside the Efficiency of AI
As with everything AI, AI moodboard tools do not have to flatten your design identity or stifle your creativity. When used wisely and in moderation, these tools can be of great use to designers without sacrificing originality. Here are a few strategies to adopt:
Use AI as a Sketchpad, Not the Final Say
Treat AI moodboards as rough drafts; let them generate options that give you ideas but don’t stop there. Instead, you should try swapping some colors and remixing the results to align with you or your client’s unique vision. Always remember that tweaking outputs generated by AI is always a good trick that rarely ever fails.
Layer Human Input
When you combine human creativity with AI-generated outputs, you can largely avoid algorithmic influence in your moodboards. Add personal touches that AI would not think to use and the result will be unique and exceptional moodboards that are tailored to you or your clients’ business needs.
Have Your Own Image Library
Curating one’s personal image libraries is a more efficient practice than relying entirely on AI’s suggestions. You can put together your own bank of photos, textures, and cultural references. You can even train AI models to generate tailored results for you by using personal inputs such as personal photos, hand-drawn assets, or niche datasets.
Get Creative with Your Prompts
Another way to avoid the pitfall of sameness with AI moodboards is to use non-trending or expected prompts. Never use “clean, modern and minimal.” Keep in mind that the more creative and specific your input is, the less generic results AI gives you.
Understanding Color Theory and Cultural Contexts
AI does not understand context the way humans do. Hence, it is important as a designer to have a strong and updated foundation in color psychology and cultural aesthetics. This way, you can be able to shape AI suggestions into meaningful creative moodboards and inject depth into your use of AI.
Are AI Tools a No-No in Design?
AI moodboard tools are invaluable for saving time and increasing productivity. From designers to businesses and agencies to individuals working on personal or small business projects, these tools offer to streamline creative processes and generate visual inspiration for a wide range of projects. So, more and more designers are getting with the program, as the use of AI in design is predicted to increase by 35% within the next year, per Super AGI. It is clear that AI is here to stay. The fear, however, is that these tools may flatten the creative landscape of design without thoughtful use and intentional human input. With AI evolving by the day, smarter AI models may offer better diversity in the future. Until then, careful use and human input is the way so that AI does not completely control the industry.
Published by HOLR Magazine.