ReVision tool helps designers mix concepts and visuals creatively
ReVision: Supporting Designers' Interpretation and Exploration of Visuals in Concepts and Forms
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Designers often look at existing images or ideas to get inspiration but can get stuck copying them too closely. The authors created ReVision, a tool that breaks down images and descriptions into pieces like concepts and visual patterns. Designers can then recombine these pieces in new ways to make different versions instead of just copying. This helps both novices and experts explore more creative options while designing.
What this means in practice
- •For graphic designers: Create new design variations by combining concepts and visual elements extracted from references.
- •For advertising creatives: Develop diverse visual themes by systematically altering conceptual and stylistic elements to avoid repetitive imagery.
Authors
Yaqing Yang, Mei-Xi Chia, Aniket Kittur
Abstract
Visual designers get inspiration from references to expand their design space. They decompose what makes a reference evocative into conceptual and visual elements, ranging from explicit attributes such as objects and colors, to less readily articulated concepts and visual motifs. They then create different visual forms to explore how the selected elements could be combined differently. Novices often struggle with these moves, instead focusing on surface features or producing limited visual variation, thus becoming fixated on the reference. Existing tools support editable visual attributes and high-level themes, but provide limited control over how conceptual interpretations relate to expressive visual motifs or how their combinations can be systematically re-expressed. We present ReVision, an AI-based tool that decomposes visual and textual references into editable conceptual interpretations and visual motifs, enables their recombination across conceptual and visual spaces, and renders each direction as divergent visual-form variations, supporting more divergent exploration during the creation process.