I Tried AI to Create a Digital Vision Board to Manifest My Dream Life

I'm a sucker for visualizations and vision boards. I've often chanted affirmations to psych myself up and scribbled letters to my future self. As a writer, words are how I call into the world what I want, but it isn't always the most practical method. The notebooks pile up, serving more as a time capsule than a manifestor. 

While I love the idea of grabbing a pile of magazines at a newsstand in New York City (how vintage), I know they'd soon be in the trash. I also don't want to be limited by what's in the magazines. 

So I'm turning to artificial intelligence for this time-old art project, because I'll only be limited by my imagination (and the AI's capacity to understand my imagination). I also want to breathe life into my vision board and find new ways to interact with it daily, as well as change it if I need to. 

No scissors required. 

I'm using the Adobe Express mobile app, a free AI design tool to create images, videos, animations and anything else you can dream up. Adobe Express integrated AI features into the tool in 2023. There's a free version of Adobe Express, as well as three paid membership tiers starting at $100 per year. The premium tiers offer more generative AI credits and advanced features. 

And Adobe just launched Photoshop on iPhone for free. 

Time to turn my dreams into a digital vision board. 

Getting set up with Adobe Express

Before jumping into Adobe, I needed to reflect on the goals I set for the year and what I'm visualizing over the next few years. I don't want to go too far out into the future, as I tend to have big goals every five years or so. E.g. starting my freelance business, traveling the world, moving to New York and now starting a family. 

My vision for the next five years includes having kids, buying a house, spending winters (their summer) in Australia with friends and family, enjoying New York City, travelling regularly and growing my global writing business. These categories can be used for my prompts. 

Now, let's turn these goals into a (hopefully) gorgeous vision board. 

I downloaded the Adobe Express app and created a free account. I clicked on Generate with AI and chose the Generate video prompt because I wanted to create a video vision board collage.

It opened up an Adobe Firefly window, which is the text-to-video model. It's a prompt per frame, with the option to upload an image. 

I started out by pasting my vision notes for the next five years to see what it could generate, but we didn't get off to a good start. It was mainly just pictures of various smiling women and the New York City skyline.

So I went back to the main dashboard and searched for "vision board" to bring up video and image templates. I browsed through the template options and picked one I liked. 

I started populating the design and alternated between two screens to generate images to replace. For example, to create the kids visual, I used this prompt: "A lesbian couple with a child, one woman has blonde hair, the other woman has brown hair."

Now onto the house with a porch. 

It was around this point I ran out of generative credits, so a paid version was required. 

I kept adding prompts to create images for each category. For example: coffee shop, Australian beach, outdoor dinner party and New York City. However, it didn't always get it right, like when I searched for Joan Didion (one of my favorite writers) and it generated an image of a man. And some of the faces it generated for that outdoor dinner party were downright scary. 

But I got there in the end. Aside from the photo of me in the middle (in New York City), the rest was all AI generated. 

If I wanted to, I could turn this into an animated video collage with music and fun elements, but for now, I'm going to keep it as a fixed file to make it my iPhone wallpaper. 

The verdict 

Using Adobe Express and its AI features to create a digital vision board was fun. While the AI didn't always get it right, it was cool to be able to generate endless images until I found one I liked. No need to purchase or waste physical magazines or be limited by what's in the pages. It's unlikely I would've found photos of two women and a baby, a house with a porch, an Australian beach, New York City and nature, in a couple of magazines. 

Sure, I could've grabbed them from Google, but it was convenient to be able to create it in one app and be able to pull from Adobe's huge library of stock images.