CoColor: Interactive Exploration of Color Designs

IUI 2023
  • Lena Hegemann
  • Niraj Ramesh Dayama
  • Abhishek Iyer
  • Erfan Farhadi
  • Ekaterina Marchenko
  • Antti Oulasvirta
Abstract

Choosing colors is a pivotal but challenging component of graphic design. The paper presents an intelligent interaction technique supporting designers' creativity in color design. It fills a gap in the literature by proposing an integrated technique for color exploration, assignment, and refinement: CoColor. Our design goals were 1) let designers focus on color choice by freeing them from pixel-level editing and 2) support rapid flow between low- and high-level decisions. Our interaction technique utilizes three steps - choice of focus, choice of suitable colors, and the colors' application to designs - wherein the choices are interlinked and computer-assisted, thus supporting divergent and convergent thinking. It considers color harmony, visual saliency, and elementary accessibility requirements. The technique was incorporated into the popular design tool Figma and evaluated in a study with 16 designers. Participants explored the coloring options more easily with CoColor and considered it helpful.

Materials

All material is open for anyone to use

Publication
paper

PDF, 20 MB
Hegemann, L., Dayama, N. R., Iyer, A., Farhadi, E., Marchenko, E., Oulasvirta, A., 2019. CoColor: Interactive Exploration of Color Designs. IUI 2023.

	    
@inproceedings{hegemann2023cocolor,
author = {Hegemann, Lena and Dayama, Niraj Ramesh and Iyer, Abhishek and Farhadi, Erfan and Marchenko, Ekaterina and Oulasvirta, Antti},
title = {CoColor: Interactive Exploration of Color Designs},
year = {2023},
isbn = {979-8-4007-0106-1/23/03},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3581641.3584089},
doi = {10.1145/3581641.3584089},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces},
location = {Sydney, NSW, Australia},
series = {IUI '23}}
				
			
Contact

For questions and further information, please contact:

Lena Hegemann

Email:
lena.hegemann (at) aalto.fi