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 designers' 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 with higher self-reported creativity compared to the baseline system without generative pipelines. While CreativeConnect was shown effective in ideation, we discussed how CreativeConnect can be extended to support other types of tasks in creativity support.

翻译：平面设计师常通过重组参考素材来激发灵感。我们的形成性研究（N=6）表明，设计师在此过程中关注概念性关键词，希望获得关键词发现、拓展及多样化重组方案探索的支持，同时保留设计创意空间。我们提出CreativeConnect系统，该系统配备生成式AI管道，可帮助用户通过关键词从参考图像中发掘有效元素，推荐相关关键词，基于用户选择的关键词生成多样化重组方案，并以含文字说明的草图形式呈现重组结果。用户研究（N=16）显示，与无生成式管道的基线系统相比，CreativeConnect能帮助用户从参考素材中发现关键词并据此生成多元创意，最终使用户产出更多设计构思，且自评创意水平更高。在验证CreativeConnect对创意构思的有效性后，我们进一步探讨了如何扩展该系统以支持创造力增强领域的其他类型任务。