Design space exploration (DSE) for Text-to-Image (TTI) models entails navigating a vast, opaque space of possible image outputs, through a commensurately vast input space of hyperparameters and prompt text. Perceptually small movements in prompt-space can surface unexpectedly disparate images. How can interfaces support end-users in reliably steering prompt-space explorations towards interesting results? Our design probe, DreamSheets, supports user-composed exploration strategies with LLM-assisted prompt construction and large-scale simultaneous display of generated results, hosted in a spreadsheet interface. Two studies, a preliminary lab study and an extended two-week study where five expert artists developed custom TTI sheet-systems, reveal various strategies for targeted TTI design space exploration—such as using templated text generation to define and layer semantic “axes” for exploration. We identified patterns in exploratory structures across our participants’ sheet-systems: configurable exploration “units” that we distill into a UI mockup, and generalizable UI components to guide future interfaces.

Vector graphics are an industry-standard way to represent and share visual designs. Designers frequently source and incorporate styles from existing designs into their work. Unfortunately, popular design tools are not well suited for this task. We present VST, Vector Style Transfer, a novel design tool for flexibly transferring visual styles between vector graphics. The core of VST lies in leveraging automation while respecting designers’ tastes and the subjectivity inherent to style transfer. In VST, designers tune a cross-design element correspondence and customize which style attributes to change. We report results from a user study in which designers used VST to control style transfer between several designs, including designs participants created with external tools beforehand. VST shows that enabling design correspondence tuning and customization is one way to support interactive, flexible style transfer.