Graphic designers often get inspiration through the recombination of references. Our formative study (N=6) reveals that graphic designers focus on conceptual keywords during this process, and want support for discovering the keywords, expanding them, and exploring diverse recombination options of them, while still having room for their creativity. We propose CreativeConnect, a system with generative AI pipelines that helps users discover useful elements from the reference image using keywords, recommends relevant keywords, generates diverse recombination options with user-selected keywords, and shows recombinations as sketches with text descriptions. Our user study (N=16) showed that CreativeConnect helped users discover keywords from the reference and generate multiple ideas based on them, ultimately helping users produce more design ideas and higher self-reported creativity, compared to the baseline system without generative pipelines. While CreativeConnect was effective in ideation, we discussed how CreativeConnect can be extended to support other types of tasks in creativity support.

翻译：平面设计师常通过参考图重组获取灵感。我们的形成性研究（N=6）揭示，设计师在此过程中聚焦概念关键词，期望获得关键词发现、拓展及多样化重组方案探索的支持，同时保留发挥创造力的空间。我们提出CreativeConnect系统，其搭载生成式AI流程，可帮助用户通过关键词从参考图中发现有效元素，推荐相关关键词，生成用户选定关键词的多样化重组方案，并以附文字说明的草图形式呈现重组效果。用户研究（N=16）表明，相较于无生成式流程的基线系统，CreativeConnect能帮助用户从参考图中发现关键词并衍生多种创意，最终使用户产出更多设计构思并提升自我报告的创造力水平。尽管CreativeConnect在构思阶段表现高效，我们仍探讨了如何将其扩展以支持创意生成中的其他任务类型。