Automated Document Design

By Steven Harrington, Lisa Purvis

March 29, 2004

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Maybe you don't think computers can appreciate beauty, but our project at Xerox's Imaging and Services Technology Center aims to change that. We're working on software that's capable of experimenting with different designs and making aesthetic judgments much the same way a human graphic designer would. We call this area of research "personalized document creation"; by blending artificial intelligence algorithms with art theory, it may someday allow small business owners to create professional-looking sales brochures with just a few minutes' work, or allow novice Web designers to create attractive personal pages with a click of a button.

Personalized Document Creation

Typically, customers who need to create a series of documents will hire a graphic designer or other expert in the field. This expert develops an overall layout for the document that includes empty slots for the customized data. The creator also finds appropriate content pieces, and specifies rules for how to fill in the custom slots with this content. The custom document application then creates a document for each customer by inserting the data for the customer into its linked slot. As a result, each document made this way typically has the same general layout, regardless of content.

In contrast, we wanted our software to create documents that can transform themselves for different sets of content, different individuals, and different devices. For example, consider a document such as the catalog page shown in Figure 1 (left). Let's say that we have created a design for the set of content shown, but then at a later time we need to remove some elements from the document because they have become out of date, and the design no longer works well (as shown in the middle page). Our system can fix the bad design to create the new layout shown on the right.

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