CPT: Controllable and Editable Design Variations with Language Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces CPT, a language model-based system that generates editable, style-aware design variations using a new structured representation called CML, enabling scalable and personalized creative workflows.

Contribution

The authors propose CPT, a decoder-only language model trained on professional designs, to produce structured, editable design variations with a novel CML format, advancing design automation.

Findings

CPT generates contextually appropriate color and font variations.

The system produces semantically structured, coherent design documents.

Experiments show promising layout adjustments while maintaining design principles.

Abstract

Designing visually diverse and high-quality designs remains a manual, time-consuming process, limiting scalability and personalization in creative workflows. We present a system for generating editable design variations using a decoder-only language model, the Creative Pre-trained Transformer (CPT), trained to predict visual style attributes in design templates. At the core of our approach is a new representation called Creative Markup Language (CML), a compact, machine-learning-friendly format that captures canvas-level structure, page layout, and element-level details (text, images, and vector graphics), including both content and style. We fine-tune CPT on a large corpus of design templates authored by professional designers, enabling it to learn meaningful, context-aware predictions for attributes such as color schemes and font choices. The model produces semantically structured and stylistically coherent outputs, preserving internal consistency across elements. Unlike generative image models, our system yields fully editable design documents rather than pixel-only images, allowing users to iterate and personalize within a design editor. In experiments, our approach generates contextual color and font variations for existing templates and shows promise in adjusting layouts while maintaining design principles.