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Pinterest is a visual discovery and bookmarking platform used by designers to collect and organize inspirational imagery into curated collections ("mood books" or mood boards).
Use in AI-assisted design workflows
Eve Bouffard, YC's Head of Design, describes Pinterest as a foundational step in her design process, particularly when working with AI tools. She returns to Pinterest to create a "mood book" for herself as a way of establishing visual direction and reference before proceeding with AI-assisted design work. →
This positions Pinterest not as an AI tool itself, but as a human-curated visual grounding step that complements and precedes AI generation — suggesting that even in AI-augmented design workflows, traditional inspiration-gathering tools retain a role in helping designers clarify aesthetic intent before delegating execution to AI systems.