Interactive Design Support using Arbitrary Onomatopoeia

Abstract

There are many interactive design tools: Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, and so on. The interactive design tools often provide their users many visual effects. The users need to look for design parameter values appropriate to their desired visual effect. Interactive design can be dealt as a sort of optimal solution search problems. In optimal solution search, initial value setting plays an important role. Onomatopoeia can solve the initial value setting of the interactive design because onomatopoeia can easily describe the visual effect. We proposed a method that allows the users to input their own arbitrary onomatopoeia to design and obtain their desired visual effect. The method hires an onomatopoeia thesaurus map that can convert the arbitrary onomatopoeia to the initial values. We adopted Japanese brush font design system as an experimental example of the interactive design tool in order to evaluate our proposed method. Human subjects used the system and set the initial values of design parameters to design bold and scratched look of target fonts. As a result, the method was able to set more appropriate initial values closer to the optimal values to design the target in comparison with other conventional methods. The proposed method can be useful to solve the initial value setting of the interactive design.