mood board
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A mood board is a curated collection of visual references — images, color palettes, typographic examples, and website screenshots — assembled to establish an aesthetic direction before or during a design process.
Role in AI-assisted design
YC's Head of Design treats mood boards as a foundational step in any design project, describing a personal practice of returning to Pinterest to assemble a visual reference book at the outset: "I always go back to Pinterest and create maybe a little mood book for myself".
Beyond personal orientation, mood boards serve a direct functional role when working with AI design agents. Rather than relying on text prompts alone — which tend to produce generic output — the recommended practice is to supply the agent with concrete visual references pulled from Pinterest or Google Images: "pull Pinterest or even like Google image and you find websites that you really like and start bookmarking them and eventually use them. Give them to your agent". The argument is that visual grounding breaks the homogeneity that text-only prompting produces.
Alternative approaches
A soul.md file — a structured text document capturing the project's personality, tone, and intent — is positioned as a complementary or alternative mechanism for conveying design direction to an AI agent, particularly when the relevant context originates from transcripts or written material rather than imagery: "I dumped the transcripts into a soul.md file specifically for that project". The two approaches are not mutually exclusive; mood boards address visual identity while soul.md addresses conceptual and tonal identity.