User-Centric Semi-Automated Infographics Authoring and Recommendation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flexible framework and an interactive tool for semi-automated infographic design that helps both novices and experts create diverse, high-quality infographics efficiently, supported by new datasets and evaluation results.

Contribution

It presents a novel flexible framework for infographic design, an interactive tool ame{}, and new datasets, enabling customizable and diverse infographic creation for users with varying expertise.

Findings

The framework and tool outperform similar tools in customization and diversity.

User studies show improved design quality and user satisfaction.

Datasets support diverse infographic generation and evaluation.

Abstract

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.