CoColor: Interactive Exploration of Color Designs
Published in ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), 2023
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.
Recommended Citation: Lena Hegemann, Niraj Ramesh Dayama, Abhishek Iyer, Erfan Farhadi, Ekaterina Marchenko, and Antti Oulasvirta. 2023. CoColor: Interactive Exploration of Color Designs. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI ‘23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 106–127. https://doi.org/10.1145/3581641.3584089