Learning from graphic designers: using grids as a scaffolding for automatic print layout
Eamonn O’Brien-Strain, Jerry Liu · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2010
We describe an approach for automatically laying out content for high quality printed formats such as magazines or brochures, producing an aesthetically pleasing layout that correctly conveys the semantic structure of the content and elicits the desired experiential affect in the reader. The semantic structure of the content includes the reading order graph, the association of illustrations with referring paragraphs, and the preservation of perceived text hierarchies. We appropriate a popular conceptual tool used by graphic designers called the grid. A well-designed grid will cause a pleasing uniformity through all the pages of a publication while still allowing flexibility in the layout of each page. In the space of different automatic layout systems, our approach is somewhere between template-based techniques and generative techniques, with the aesthetics determined by the combination of the grid and a generative algorithm One consequence of using the grid is that it greatly reduces the space of possible layouts from a high dimensional continuous space to a discrete space. Using a simple greedy algorithm, our first results are promising.