ReVision: Supporting Designers'Interpretation and Exploration of Visuals in Concepts and Forms

Abstract

Visual designers get inspiration from references to expand their design space. They decompose what makes a reference evocative into conceptual and visual elements, ranging from explicit attributes such as objects and colors, to less readily articulated concepts and visual motifs. They then create different visual forms to explore how the selected elements could be combined differently. Novices often struggle with these moves, instead focusing on surface features or producing limited visual variation, thus becoming fixated on the reference. Existing tools support editable visual attributes and high-level themes, but provide limited control over how conceptual interpretations relate to expressive visual motifs or how their combinations can be systematically re-expressed. We present ReVision, an AI-based tool that decomposes visual and textual references into editable conceptual interpretations and visual motifs, enables their recombination across conceptual and visual spaces, and renders each direction as divergent visual-form variations, supporting more divergent exploration during the creation process.