Prism: Enhancing Graphic Designers’ Visual Research with Interactive Search Trails

Abstract

Graphic designers often use the Web to collect images to use as inspiration and references for their work. Their resulting collections of images, however, typically do not retain important aspects of their visual research, such as their thought process when searching and all explored design avenues. Guided by an exploratory study with 14 expert graphic designers, we developed Prism – a system that supports a graphic designer’s visual research on the Internet by automatically capturing all inspected images and annotating them with the designer’s search trails. We evaluated Prism through a two-week field study with 11 expert designers. Our findings suggest that Prism’s capture and display capabilities helped the designers to reify their design thinking, to better reflect on and compare alternative design ideas, and to collaborate with their colleagues and clients.

Video

Citation

Dziubak, V., & Bunt, A. (2018, June). Prism: Enhancing Graphic Designers' Visual Research with Interactive Search Trails. In Proceedings of the 2018 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2018 (pp. 1283-1294). ACM.