InkIdeator: Supporting Chinese-Style Visual Design Ideation via AI-Infused Exploration of Chinese Paintings

TL;DR

InkIdeator is an AI-powered system that helps Chinese-style visual designers explore and analyze Chinese paintings by annotating cultural dimensions and generating visual ideas, enhancing creative ideation.

Contribution

This paper introduces InkIdeator, a novel AI system that annotates Chinese paintings with cultural dimensions and supports ideation for Chinese-style visual design.

Findings

InkIdeator effectively suggests cultural symbols and generates visual examples.

Users explored Chinese paintings more efficiently with InkIdeator.

Designers found InkIdeator useful for integrating cultural dimensions into their work.

Abstract

Visual designers often seek inspiration from Chinese paintings when tasked with creating Chinese-style illustrations, posters, etc. Our formative study (N=10) reveals that during ideation, designers learn the cultural symbols, emotions, compositions, and styles in Chinese paintings but face challenges in searching, analyzing, and integrating these dimensions. This paper leverages multi-modal large models to annotate the value of each dimension in 16,315 Chinese paintings, built on which we propose InkIdeator, an ideation support system for Chinese-style visual designs. InkIdeator suggests cultural symbols associated with the task theme, provides dimensional keywords to help analyze Chinese paintings, and generates visual examples integrating user-selected keywords. Our within-subjects study (N=12) using a baseline system without extracted dimensional keywords, along with two extended use cases by Chinese painters, indicates InkIdeator's effectiveness in creative ideation support, helping users efficiently explore cultural dimensions in Chinese paintings and visualize their ideas. We discuss implications for supporting culture-related visual design ideation with generative AI.