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Visual blends are an advanced graphic design technique to draw attention to a message. They combine two objects in a way that is novel and useful in conveying a message symbolically. This paper presents VisiBlends, a flexible workflow for creating visual blends that follows the iterative design process. We introduce a design pattern for blending symbols based on principles of human visual object recognition. Our workflow decomposes the process into both computational techniques and human microtasks. It allows users to collaboratively generate visual blends with steps involving brainstorming, synthesis, and iteration. An evaluation of the workflow shows that decentralized groups can generate blends in independent microtasks, co-located groups can collaboratively make visual blends for their own messages, and VisiBlends improves novices' ability to make visual blends.
Chilton et al. (Mon,) studied this question.