Why mood boards in Figma hurt

This is partly an explainer and partly a rant. Skip it if you’re allergic to either.

Figma is a remarkable tool. We both use it daily. But over the last few years we’ve watched ourselves rebuild the same mood-board setup perhaps a thousand times, and every single time there’s friction that’s not about the creative work.

1. Images don’t know they’re on a grid

You drop in a reference. It’s 2048px wide and 3072px tall. Now you resize it by eye to match the other images you’ve already placed. Later you swap it for a different reference, which is 1600×1200. Resize again. Your grid is already crooked.

Auto-layout helps, sort of, but only if you commit to a flex container and then fight it when you actually want two 4:5 images side by side.

2. Palettes are a separate ceremony

You finish the board, you’re happy with it, and now you need a palette. Screenshot each image. Open it in a colour picker plugin. Sample four swatches. Copy each hex. Paste into a text layer. Adjust the text. Repeat for the next image. Thirty minutes go by.

3. Export is worse than it should be

Figma exports at 1x by default. The PDF export shrinks everything. For anything print-bound you need to fiddle with constraints, export settings, and sometimes restructure frames.

4. Plugins rot

We had a working stack of three plugins — one for palette extraction, one for Unsplash, one for grid snapping. Two of them have broken at least once since January. The maintainer of one has moved on from Figma entirely.

What we did instead

We wrote a narrow tool that does exactly the four things we need, nothing more. Drop images onto a grid. Snap or freeform. Pull a palette in one click. Export to PNG or PDF in one click. No plugins, no layers panel, no constraints, no auto-layout.

It’s not going to replace Figma for any of the other work we do. But for the twenty minutes we spend on a mood board, the friction has mostly disappeared. Mission accomplished; we can now go back to the actual design work.

If any of this resonates, the tool is at pixelquick.org.