DesignAsCode: Bridging Structural Editability and Visual Fidelity in Graphic Design Generation

TL;DR

DesignAsCode introduces a programmatic approach to graphic design generation using HTML/CSS, balancing visual fidelity and structural editability, and enabling advanced features like layout retargeting and animations.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework that models graphic design as a code synthesis task with a new pipeline, improving validity and aesthetics over prior methods.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in validity and aesthetic quality.

Enables automatic layout retargeting and complex document generation.

Supports CSS-based animations and code-native editing.

Abstract

Graphic design generation demands a delicate balance between high visual fidelity and fine-grained structural editability. However, existing approaches typically bifurcate into either non-editable raster image synthesis or abstract layout generation devoid of visual content. Recent combinations of these two approaches attempt to bridge this gap but often suffer from rigid composition schemas and unresolvable visual dissonances (e.g., text-background conflicts) due to their inexpressive representation and open-loop nature. To address these challenges, we propose DesignAsCode, a novel framework that reimagines graphic design as a programmatic synthesis task using HTML/CSS. Specifically, we introduce a Plan-Implement-Reflect pipeline, incorporating a Semantic Planner to construct dynamic, variable-depth element hierarchies and a Visual-Aware Reflection mechanism that iteratively optimizes the code to rectify rendering artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DesignAsCode significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both structural validity and aesthetic quality. Furthermore, our code-native representation unlocks advanced capabilities, including automatic layout retargeting, complex document generation (e.g., resumes), and CSS-based animation. Our project page is available at https://liuziyuan1109.github.io/design-as-code/.