Color design is essential in areas such as product, graphic, and fashion design. However, current tools like Photoshop, with their concrete-driven color manipulation approach, often stumble during early ideation, favoring polished end results over initial exploration. We introduced Mondrian as a test-bed for abstraction-driven approach using interactive color palettes for image colorization. Through a formative study with six design experts, we selected three design options for visual abstractions in color design and developed Mondrian where humans work with abstractions and AI manages the concrete aspects. We carried out a user study to understand the benefits and challenges of each abstraction format and compare the Mondrian with Photoshop. A survey involving 100 participants further examined the influence of each abstraction format on color composition perceptions. Findings suggest that interactive visual abstractions encourage a non-linear exploration workflow and an open mindset during ideation, thus providing better creative affordance.

翻译：色彩设计在产品设计、平面设计和时尚设计等领域至关重要。然而，当前像Photoshop这类采用具体驱动色彩操控方式的工具，在早期构思阶段往往表现不佳，更倾向于追求最终的精修结果而非初步探索。我们提出了Mondrian作为测试平台，探索基于交互式调色板的抽象驱动图像着色方法。通过一项面向六位设计专家的形成性研究，我们筛选出三种适用于色彩设计的视觉抽象方案，并开发了Mondrian系统——在该系统中，人类处理抽象概念，AI管理具体细节。我们通过用户研究评估了每种抽象形式的优势与挑战，并将Mondrian与Photoshop进行了对比。一项包含100名参与者的调查进一步探究了不同抽象形式对色彩构成感知的影响。研究结果表明，交互式视觉抽象能够促进非线性探索流程并激发构思阶段的开放思维，从而提供更优的创意支持。