Xerox's ADL a design tool for the masses

Here's a great idea for the design challenged: a design tool that will do a competent layout for novices. That's what Jonas Karlsson, is working on at the Xerox Innovation Group. Karlsson, a research scientist in the Images and Services Technology Center, is developing a technology called Automated Document Layout. I spoke with him recently about the technology.

Karlsson views ADL as a way to take away the need to rework designs that to change frequently, such as a travel destinations flier that has different copy and images for each location. Other applications might include personalized newsletters and targeted advertising. Once an initial design is completed, having a designer touch all 100, 1,000 or 10,000  variations can get very expensive. The goal behind ADL is to find a way to let a novice do that work.

While designers can create templates to do repetitive designs, those are fairly rigid, Karlsson says. Design templates can set rules for such things as length of text, size of images, and so on. ADL offers more flexibility. It contains rules that allow it to adapt to a different text length or image size and still come up with a competent layout.

The key is developing the right rule sets. "We've identified design metrics and aesthetics. Things like alignment, the notion of balance, overlap," Karlsson says. The user can set some of those parameters as well. When the user inputs the images and text, the system begins trying variations and uses genetic algorithms to assign values. The design with the highest value wins. Multiple variants flip by in rapid succession before a final design is displayed. "It's sort of trying to mimic evolution in some sense," he says.

Design rules can be appended or modified to suit the application. For example, a corporation may want to preserve certain design rules to retain the look and feel of the corporate brand on all documents.

Could the user tune ADL to the preferences of an individual designer or have ADL learn the designer's technique based on a review of historical designs? That's possible, Karlsson says, but would be an extension to ADL. "It's not a one size fits all application. It's more of a platform on which other applications can be developed," he says. Xerox is considering licensing ADL to others as well as embedding it in some Xerox products.

Karlsson envisions ADL being used in a copy center as a front end to its large-scale printing systems. A design novice could then use the system to make adjustments to variable documents on the fly. "These types of documents are interesting to Xerox because this is where digital press works really well as opposed to offset," he says.

Although the goal is to produce a final document that is acceptable, ADL won't replace a designer anytime soon. "Our system couldn't create quite as nice a document as a designer can do but it can remove a lot of the drudge work of making sure everything fits," Karlsson says.

Xerox has had very little interest from graphics designers and art houses, which may view the technology as more of a threat than a time saver. But Karlsson doesn't think they should worry.

"If you look at advertisements in Wired magazine they would score low on a lot of our design metrics. Those designers figured out how do I break the rules in a way that looks fresh and exciting," Karlsson says. Because ADL is based on sets of predefined rules, it can't do that. "If you don't know how to break the rules in the right way it comes out looking horrible."