Iconix: Controlling Semantics and Style in Progressive Icon Grids Generation

TL;DR

Iconix is a human-AI system that generates stylistically consistent icon grids by organizing icons along semantic richness and visual complexity axes, aiding designers in creative exploration.

Contribution

We introduce Iconix, a novel co-creative system that constructs icon grids with controllable semantics and style, enhancing design reasoning and creativity.

Findings

Participants produced more creative icon grids with Iconix.

Iconix reduced user workload during icon design.

Users explored a broader range of design variations.

Abstract

Visual communication often needs stylistically consistent icons that span concrete and abstract meanings, for use in diverse contexts. We present Iconix, a human-AI co-creative system that organizes icon generation along two axes: semantic richness (what is depicted) and visual complexity (how much detail). Given a user-specified concept, Iconix constructs a semantic scaffold of related analytical perspectives and employs chained, image-conditioned generation to produce a coherent style of exemplars. Each exemplar is then automatically distilled into a progressive sequence, from detailed and elaborate to abstract and simple. The resulting two-dimensional grid exposes a navigable space, helping designers reason jointly about figurative content and visual abstraction. A within-subjects study (N = 32) found that compared to a baseline workflow, participants produced icon grids more creatively, reported lower workload, and explored a coherent range of design variations. We discuss implications for human-machine co-creative approaches that couple semantic scaffolding with progressive simplification to support visual abstraction.