Creating mood boards using AI image tools - Figma Tutorial

- [Speaker] An easy way to start integrating AI into your product design workflow is to use it to get alignment on design direction. Collaborating cross-functionally can be a challenge. Both AI, you can make it much easier to get everyone on the same page quickly. Moodboards are a way of visually illustrating and design, look and feel. The idea is that with a moodboard, you can get alignment from everyone in the subtle elements of design without having to hard lock down fonts, color palettes, and actual design elements. This should be an iterative process that includes anyone involved in the design process. This might extend across functions and could even include users and customers. In my experience, I have found that it's best to present a few moodboards to all involved and gather feedback. If you bring them a good variety. It should spark a conversation about what comes to mind when thinking about your new product idea or existing product redesign. From there, you can come up with a final and either present it and explain how you came to it or get feedback and do another iteration. We're going to jump into some chat tool soon and use that to generate our mood boards. But before we get started, let's talk about prompts. When you're writing prompts, you want to be as specific as you can. Some key elements to think about when you're writing prompts for moodboards, what is the context? What type of product is it? What is the industry? What does your company, what is your company's brand look and feel? This can set the context and help AI know what to generate. Colors and feelings about the colors is very important 'cause it will use these colors to generate your moodboard. You can use actual types of colors like primary or neutral, or if you want, you can focus more on the feelings, like I want them to be bright or summary, things like that. Keywords that express your idea can be helpful, innovative, fun, engaging. These are all good descriptors that ChatGPT or other tools can use to generate images. And finally, anything visual you can add will really help in the generation of the moodboard. Things about like gardens or rocket ships or professional or glass or whatever comes to mind when you're thinking about your project. So let's go ahead and jump in to ChatGPT. I'm going to go ahead and create a new chat. And in my chat, I'm going to say generate a moodboard for a project I'm working on. My company is in aerospace and we are developing software to support manufacturing of high-tech equipment. We want this project to have cool coloring, a professional look that is functional and simple, but futuristic, colors that come to mind are blue, black, silver, gray, and soft whites, right? So now, I've set a lot of the context and the things I need. I've added some nice keywords in here, like futuristic. I could add other things like some visual elements that might be helpful are cockpit instrumentation, airplanes and rockets and other aeronautical type things. So when I'm done, I can go ahead and I can generate my moodboard. Now ChatGPT is so smart that it actually knows what a moodboard is so it can create it. So once you're completed, ChatGPT generates a basic moodboard. Sometimes, it will offer you suggestions about what you might need to do in terms of refining it. In this example, it doesn't really actually give many suggestions. I like in this instance, and this is why I use ChatGPT, is it doesn't actually have fonts and it doesn't actually have much by way of words, ChatGPT is not good at words, but it is good at creating raster images like this. You could use other tools like Claude and other LLMs, however, Claude for example, tends to generate these as line-based images as SVGs, which have a decidedly different feel. But this allows us to get a real good look and feel and sort of determine what we want to go forward with. So if you want, you can keep refining, my personal opinion is to keep text out. What you could do is you could actually say, "This is great, can you suggest some fonts that might be appropriate?" That way, you can get some fonts and you can use those. And keep in mind, you don't have to deliver this exactly how it's delivering it. You could generate a couple more moodboards and bring them out and sort of put them on, you know, a single slide or a couple of slides when you present them to people. I like to also play around. So these are some good ideas of fonts. You'll have to go look them up. They're not sort of natively built into here, but you can go ahead and put them out. And then if you want to generate some more mood boards, please generate a couple of other mood. This can help you to have more to talk about with your team. One thing that you'll find when you're editing images in ChatGPT is that it's sometimes easier to start all over than it is to modify what's there. If you start trying to change it, it doesn't always understand exactly what you're saying. So sometimes, it's better to sort of reconceive the entire notion and come back. You can see these are all very similar. So what you would want to do is to generate more varied graphics is to give it different prompts and come back out. And then you'll have a nice set of samples that you can show and determine what your team likes and doesn't like. When you go to present this to your team, I recommend taking copious notes or using a no-taker tool like Otter in your Zoom call. And then you can actually feed those notes directly into ChatGPT and use ChatGPT to do the refinements and that will give you a final moodboard you can run from. So creating moodboards are a great way for designers to work through some of the softer and what I call squishier aspects of product design. This process can help to get alignment from everyone on how something should look and feel. And then we can start focusing on the functional aspects of the design moving forward. So we looked at in this unit how we can use AI to generate moodboards. We talked about how to write a good prompt, setting context using colors and other visual elements to get good moodboards. We looked at how we're going to iterate on this so that we can do a refinement and bring something back to the team so that everyone's aligned. And then, of course, we can ask ChatGPT for examples, of fonts and use those to play around with. For the next steps, I recommend try creating your own moodboard. Try ChatGPT, but try some other tools as well and see what you like and what you don't like about each of the different tools. Work on your prompts. Experiment with saying different styles and different themes and setting the tone and see what you get back from the AI. Make sure to get lots of feedback and when possible, you can use tools and that feedback. You can feed directly into ChatGPT to make it easier to come up with your next iterations. And then, of course, look deeper into typography, look at examples and share that with your team.