Graphic-Design-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating AI on Graphic Design Tasks

TL;DR

GraphicDesignBench (GDB) is a comprehensive benchmark suite for evaluating AI models across various professional graphic design tasks, highlighting current limitations in spatial reasoning, vector graphics, and animation understanding.

Contribution

The paper introduces GDB, the first benchmark targeting the full spectrum of professional graphic design tasks, with standardized evaluation metrics and real-world design templates.

Findings

Current models struggle with complex layout reasoning

Models have difficulty generating accurate vector graphics

Semantic understanding is better than structural and spatial accuracy

Abstract

We introduce GraphicDesignBench (GDB), the first comprehensive benchmark suite designed specifically to evaluate AI models on the full breadth of professional graphic design tasks. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on natural-image understanding or generic text-to-image synthesis, GDB targets the unique challenges of professional design work: translating communicative intent into structured layouts, rendering typographically faithful text, manipulating layered compositions, producing valid vector graphics, and reasoning about animation. The suite comprises 50 tasks organized along five axes: layout, typography, infographics, template & design semantics and animation, each evaluated under both understanding and generation settings, and grounded in real-world design templates drawn from the LICA layered-composition dataset. We evaluate a set of frontier closed-source models using a standardized metric taxonomy covering spatial accuracy, perceptual quality, text fidelity, semantic alignment, and structural validity. Our results reveal that current models fall short on the core challenges of professional design: spatial reasoning over complex layouts, faithful vector code generation, fine-grained typographic perception, and temporal decomposition of animations remain largely unsolved. While high-level semantic understanding is within reach, the gap widens sharply as tasks demand precision, structure, and compositional awareness. GDB provides a rigorous, reproducible testbed for tracking progress toward AI systems that can function as capable design collaborators. The full evaluation framework is publicly available.