Bringing ideas to life with Mixboard is easy and incredibly fun. I've been experimenting with the free tool from Google AI Labs a lot lately to brainstorm, visualize and refine my ideas. It's essentially a flexible canvas when you can post images and sketch out anything — and now you can upload PDFs.
Mixboard is ideal for DIY projects, party planning, product ideas, even early drafts for work presentations because with Gemini 3.0 and Nano Banana built in, the story comes to life as you expand, remix and organize everything in one place.
I recently tested the newest features with my four-year-old's art and a brain dump of my current writing projects. Here's how it went.
Turn Mixboards into full presentations
Mixboard can now convert an entire board into a polished presentation, complete with structure, design and higher-fidelity visuals.
Here’s how it works:
- Start by uploading your images or creating them within the board
- Let Mixboard analyze your main board: text, images and layout
- Nano Banana then upgrades everything with sharper images and cleaner text
The result is a full deck built from whatever you’ve been brainstorming. It’s especially useful for design ideas, vision boards, work pitches or anything you want to communicate visually without starting from scratch.
I recently tried the presenation feature by uploading my four-year-old's artwork and then allowing Mixboard to add an AI-generated story. Users can add their own, but I let Gemini 3.0 take over this time. Then, I hit 'Transform' and created a unique presentation. I made it shareable, so viewers can click "Presentation" on the top right corner to take a look.
For this project, I had images to upload, but for your own presentation if you are lacking visuals, you can prompt Mixboard to create images for you.
Plus, a new built-in selfie camera lets you snap quick photos of yourself — handy for outfit planning or wardrobe inspiration. Imagine putting together a collection of your favorite outfits to refer to season after season?
Expanded file support now includes PDFs
The new ability to add PDFs is a game-changer. I now use it to upload writing projects, important messages from the kids' school and recipes that I want to share with my mom friends.
This update offers a wide variety of use cases, especially with Mixboard's expanded board size and new multiple boards inside a single project. And, when you want to make edits, just doodle directly onto the image to guide the edits.
Simply draw over the area, describe what you want, and Mixboard will adjust or regenerate that part of the image. You can use the same doodle-based editing on your presentations too.
It’s ideal for quick tweaks like color changes, adding or removing objects, adjusting layout elements or refining slides before a meeting. Best of all, no design skills required.
Bottom line
Mixboard is still an experiment, but it’s quickly becoming one of my favorite AI tools within Google Labs. It's certainly one of the most interesting creative tools with AI-power behind the scenes.
If you haven't checked it out or are still looking for a reason to try it, take a look and bring your ideas. With presentations powered by Nano Banana Pro, better editing controls and support for multiple boards, it’s evolving from a simple idea canvas into a flexible workspace for anything you’re building.
If you’re someone who juggles lots of ideas — or just wants an easier way to visualize them — these updates make Mixboard worth a try.
More from Tom's Guide
- GPT-5.2 is around the corner — but it might not be enough to take on Anthropic and Gemini
- Elon Musk’s Grok 4.1 vs Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Sonnet — here’s the AI model that’s actually smarter
- The ‘no prompt’ rule makes ChatGPT give expert-level writing advice — here’s how it works
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