Hi!
I am Sérgio Rebelo and I am Ph.D. student at the University of Coimbra.
In the following minutes, I will introduce our work on the evolution of poster designs.
This work is mostly inspired by the letterpress posters production workflow from the 19th century.
At that time, designers typeset the posters by using the maximum of typographic resources,
and by highlighting the most important parts of the content.
So
In this work, we are developing an evolutionary system that generates typographic posters,
from given textual input.
The system employs lexicon-based approaches to detect the most important parts of the text
and uses a Genetic Algorithmic to evolve the poster designs.
Although the system automatically evaluates the posters,
users may express their preferences by defining several
settings and visual features.
The system behaves as follows.
The generative process starts with the semantic analysis of the input text.
This analysis recognises emotions and colours associated with the text.
After, the evolutionary process begins.
First, a random population of poster designs is created.
Next, each poster in the population is evaluated.
The evaluation process is twofold.
First, each poster is evaluated according to three objectives:
legibility, aesthetics, and semantics.
Next, the fitness of each poster is assigned according to the strategy selected by the user.
The user may pick one of three approaches:
A multi-criteria hardwired strategy,
that considers that quality posters are those which fully satisfy all three objectives
(legibility, semantics and aesthetics).
Also, a multi-objective strategy
that considers that quality posters are those that promote more innovative relationships between the same three objectives.
and,
finally, a hybrid strategy
that considers that quality posters should be readable and,
at the same time,
present innovative relationships between the semantics and the aesthetics objectives.
After the evaluation,
a new generation is created through the employment of variation operators.
This evolutionary process is repeated until a stop criterion is fulfilled.
To study how the evolution is affected by the fitness assignment,
we conducted a set of three experiments with the presented system.
Here, we are only focused on understanding how each evaluation strategy influences the evolution of posters.
These experiments are conducted by evolving posters with the same contents and under the same settings.
The only changing factor is the fitness assignment strategy.
The multi-criteria hardwired strategy allowed the generation of readable posters from scratch.
In this slide, you can observe some outputs generated.
You can note that the visual diversity between posters with the same content is reduced.
On the other hand,
the multi-objective strategy cannot ensure the generation of fully readable posters.
In this image, you may observe some typical posters generated through this approach.
We can observe that this strategy generates more diverse compositions than the previous one;
however,
we noted that when the user requests the optimisation of the legibility objective,
the system produces more readable outputs.
Finally
the hybrid strategy also allows the generation of readable poster designs from scratch.
In this image, you may observe some typical posters generated by this approach.
We observed that the visual diversity of posters is slightly higher, compared with a multi-criteria strategy.
In conclusion,
we observed a high potential for the combined use of the three fitness assignment approaches during the evolution.
Also,
this work unveils how automatic approaches can consider the users’ preferences to bypass the common limitation of the automatic evolutionary systems.
And,
at last,
we believe that systems, like this, are useful tools for stimulating graphic designers’ creativity
in the most exploratory stages of their design processes.
I am finishing my presentation here.
So, you may read more about the project in the conference proceedings or in our laboratory website.
Thank you all for the attention.