Desigen: A Pipeline for Controllable Design Template Generation
Authors: Haohan Weng, Danqing Huang, Yu Qiao, Zheng Hu, Chin-Yew Lin, Tong Zhang, C. L. Philip Chen

Templates serve as a good starting point to implement a design (e.g. banner slide) but it takes great effort from designers to manually create. In this paper we present Desigen an automatic template creation pipeline which generates background images as well as harmonious layout elements over the background. Different from natural images a background image should preserve enough non-salient space for the overlaying layout elements. To equip existing advanced diffusion-based models with stronger spatial control we propose two simple but effective techniques to constrain the saliency distribution and reduce the attention weight in desired regions during the background generation process. Then conditioned on the background we synthesize the layout with a Transformer-based autoregressive generator. To achieve a more harmonious composition we propose an iterative inference strategy to adjust the synthesized background and layout in multiple rounds. We constructed a design dataset with more than 40k advertisement banners to verify our approach. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed pipeline generates high-quality templates comparable to human designers. More than a single-page design we further show an application of presentation generation that outputs a set of theme-consistent slides. The data and code are available at https://whaohan.github.io/desigen.