The Poster Factory is a work in progress research project that explores the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the poster design scenario. Currently, the outputs of this project are generated thought three computational poster design approaches: the Evolutionary Poster Composer; the Environmental Adaptative Poster Composer; and the Interactive Moving Poster Composer.
Each approach explores different computational techniques and includes distinct kinds of data in the generation process. The generated outputs achieve a more interactive and participative relation with its audience.
Also, these approaches may be powerful tools during the poster design processes, especially in the earliest and most exploratory stages of a design project. The Evolutionary Poster Composer approach experiments with (semi-)automatic evolutionary systems for generating and evolving letterpress-inspired typographical posters.
Briefly, these systems interactively arrange a certain text, divided into text boxes, in order to design posters designs from textual input. The input may be given by the user or gathered automatically using web APIs.
Also, the users may guide the evolutionary process of these systems according to their preferences and tastes. The Environmental Adaptive Poster Composer approach generates posters according to the state of the surroundings of a specific site.
This way, these systems gather data from the surrounding environment (e. g. air temperature, current people near the installation, passers-by flux, level of light in the environment, etc.
) and translate them in posters designs. In this process, direct and indirect environmental reading techniques (such as Context-Aware Data and Computer Vision) are employed to read the environment and assess the outputs generated.
Also, these systems learn, over time, how to generate outputs optimised to the environment where it is placed. They achieve this analysing its previous designs and the interaction which they triggered in people in the environment.
The Interactive Moving Poster approach enables the design of interactive moving posters, i. e. posters that enables the audience to shape themselves based on their physical gestures and behaviour.
This way, these systems always present and generate different outputs according to the interaction of its audience. In these approaches, computer vision techniques, context-aware data and physical computing are used to read the behaviour of the audience and to enable their communication with the generative system that designs the posters.
More information in cdv. dei. uc. pt/poster-factory/
