EvoDesigner: Evolving Poster Layouts

Frequently, one of the goals of Graphic Design (gd) is discovering disruptive visual solutions that stand out and attract people’s attention. However, due to the increasing democratisation of gd, graphic designers tend to adopt design trends, leading to designs that many times lack innovative and catchy features. EvoDesigner is an evolutionary extension for Adobe InDesign that aims to aid gd processes by automatically evolving layout and style variations of given InDesign pages. The generated pages might be previously created and post-edited by designers, promoting co-creation. As an extension of the study EvoDesigner: Towards Aiding Creativity in Graphic Design, this article begins with a general introduction of EvoDesigner. Then, we review previous experiments on evolving pages towards the page balance of existing target posters. Furthermore, we present new experiments exploring the benefits of using grid systems to position and scale page items along with a user survey made to gather feedback about the impact of grid systems in the generated pages and showcase examples of artefacts created from the collaboration between designers and the system. The findings indicate that the presented techniques can be used to interpret current layouts in different manners, and suggest that grid systems may be a useful tool for promoting the automatic production of layouts with better organisation when compared to applying no organisational constraints. However, a conducted user survey indicates that, depending on the goals of the designers, more organised layouts might not always be synonymous with better results.