User-Centric Semi-Automated Infographics Authoring and Recommendation
This addresses the time-consuming process of infographics design for non-experts and professional designers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing automation concepts.
The authors tackled the problem of tedious infographics design by proposing a flexible framework and interactive tool that streamlines the generation workflow, allowing users to control and optimize design components independently, with results showing it excels in creating customized infographics and exploring a large variety of designs.
Designing infographics can be a tedious process for non-experts and time-consuming even for professional designers. Based on the literature and a formative study, we propose a flexible framework for automated and semi-automated infographics design. This framework captures the main design components in infographics and streamlines the generation workflow into three steps, allowing users to control and optimize each aspect independently. Based on the framework, we also propose an interactive tool, \name{}, for assisting novice designers with creating high-quality infographics from an input in a markdown format by offering recommendations of different design components of infographics. Simultaneously, more experienced designers can provide custom designs and layout ideas to the tool using a canvas to control the automated generation process partially. As part of our work, we also contribute an individual visual group (VG) and connection designs dataset (in SVG), along with a 1k complete infographic image dataset with segmented VGs. This dataset plays a crucial role in diversifying the infographic designs created by our framework. We evaluate our approach with a comparison against similar tools, a user study with novice and expert designers, and a case study. Results confirm that our framework and \name{} excel in creating customized infographics and exploring a large variety of designs.