The BEST AI Tool For Designers (render collage board & brainstorm with AI)

Resources

• Fabrie
• Fabrie Web Clipper
• Fabrie Midjourney Extension

What if your go-to moodboard app joined forces with ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion? So you could automatically generate mindmaps, brainstorm ideas, and render images from reference boards – all within one powerful platform.

Let me show you what it would look like. Today, I’ll try a new mood board app specifically designed for designers by designers. I’ll mainly use it for architectural and interior design, but you can basically use it for any design process – like product design, fashion, game, and industrial design. Let’s create an account first.

It’s completely free to create an account and use Fabrie, including all the AI features. After logging in, they have lots of ready-to-use templates you can use to see what types of workflows you can create. You can also use them to start building faster. If we check one of the templates, like interior design for example, you can see how they documented the process weekly – what the feedback was from the client, what was discussed and ultimately chosen, etc. I’ll simply open an empty canvas to start. I want to create an intro page with a reference board and furniture options for this elderly co-housing project I’m working on.

You can import many file types – images, videos, voice, PDFs, and even Procreate and Photoshop files directly. I’ll place the floor plan into a frame to keep it organized.

I’ll focus on one of the units and find some furniture examples for this studio flat. One thing I really liked about Fabrie is the integrations and extensions they created to streamline the process for designers. For example, they have a desktop app you can install and use.

But the one I will use right now is their browser extension. After installing, you can either capture an area of your screen and it automatically saves to your Library. You can also just hold an image and drop it to their pop-up, and it will be saved.

Then you can place items from your Library onto your canvas. So I’ve collected some materials for the bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom furniture. I want to find a small, cute sofa with a coffee table and plants for the living room area. This one looks good. Let’s test some more exciting features.

When you click to an image on the canvas, we have options to edit – crop, flip, etc. But when you click the purple AI button, you can get text from the image, upscale it, and remove the background. Let’s cut out this sofa. And it’s removed!

I’ll add some more objects the same way. Okay, it looks pretty complete, but I want to make it even better. When I right-click an image, we can combine them into a single PNG.

To render this image, open the Imagine tab, choose the image mode, and just slide the PNG here.

We can pick which model to use, how close it should stay to the input, add a text description for the scene, and we have some additional style option like these ones.

There are advanced settings too but you don’t need to change them. Let’s generate.

Here are the renders – overall pretty accurate and good quality from a reference board. It generates 4 options; I’ll create another set with an interior lighting style and add them to my board.

Around 4-5 months ago I did a similar video on this workflow, from moodboard to render. But I didn’t know about Fabrie then, or maybe they weren’t available yet.

I used Midjourney and some other platforms. That process had more steps and relatively more manual work. In terms of quality, some weren’t bad but almost none were great for consistency with the base image and overall quality.

So when we have a chance to do a comparison of course I will do it. This was the base image I used in that old video, and here are the results from different platforms next to Fabrie’s. You can decide which looks better yourself.

In the project, we have a long, shared balcony and I want to visualize how the space will be used. I found these base images and want to add a couple of people, to show residents interacting and having better social lives in this co-living community.

Maybe add some plants too. Once done, I’ll merge them, copy as PNG, and drop into Imagine tab. Just add a short description, but this time I’ll choose the Marker Hand Sketch style option.

Look at these results, absolutely incredible and they really captured the interaction and emotions I want to reflect.

I think this frame is completed, let’s create another one to add more details about the project and come up with new ideas.

Fabrie Imagine wasn’t the only AI integration. Next is Fabrie Write, which you can use for mind maps, SWOT analysis, diagrams, pros and cons, and brainstorming.

I want to brainstorm furniture ideas for small studio apartments, especially bedrooms and living rooms. It adds sticky notes with possible ideas – Murphy beds, room dividers, loft beds, etc. Not bad, but what if we could actually see these ideas?

Right-click the notepad and select text-to-image. Here are some Murphy beds.

I’ll add this to the bedroom furniture options too. I can do the same for the others, but I’ll try this one in Midjourney. I’ll copy the text as a prompt there. Okay, I’ve generated some options from Midjourney that I also want to add to my board. They created an extension to directly import images from Midjourney into Fabrie, along with their prompts.

Install the extension here, and connect it to your account with /bind comment. Later when I want to use an image, I will use the /collect command and type how many images I want to transfer. I can see them in my library right now and place it here for this idea.

Import all Midjourney prompts and images in 1 click:

• Step 1
  Join Fabrie’s Discord

• Step 2
  Use /bind command to connect your Discord and Fabrie account.

That’s it! Learn more here.

We’ve collected a variety of different furniture options for this unit, and it’s starting to get a bit confusing. Maybe we could combine everything necessary into a table with columns for room, name, price, materials, URLs, and images.

We can ask it to generate it automatically. And it’s ready like this!

Later you can edit it however you want, add pictures directly from the board, and view them in the gallery format. Once it’s done we can also export it as an Excel file.

Finally, I generated some text description of the overall project idea and a SWOT analysis showing different aspects.

I think that covers this project for now! You can share a link to your board with your team or publicly anyone online. I put the link to the board we created together in the video description – feel free to check it out.

So I hope you enjoyed the video and Fabrie. Thank you Fabrie for sponsoring this video. I genuinely liked the platform and got excited about it, which is why I wanted to share it with you too.

Let me know what you think! And don’t forget to look at it and try it out – it’s completely free at the moment. You can find the link below.

I hope you liked it, thanks for watching till now and see you in the next one!