Piet: Facilitating Color Authoring for Motion Graphics Video

1University of Waterloo, 2Harvard University, 3Microsoft Research Asia
This work is done during Xinyu Shi and Yinghou Wang's internship in MSRA.
CHI 2024
Best Paper Award

Piet is a color authoring tool for motion graphic videos. Piet features an interactive palette that users can directly manipulate on. This palette visually represent color distributions throughout the video, support controllable focus levels, and enable quick theme probing via grouped color shifts.

Abstract

Motion graphic (MG) videos are effective and compelling for presenting complex concepts through animated visuals; and colors are important to convey desired emotions, maintain visual continuity, and signal narrative transitions. However, current video color authoring workflows are fragmented, lacking contextual previews, hindering rapid theme adjustments, and not aligning with designers’ progressive authoring flows. To bridge this gap, we introduce Piet, the first tool tailored for MG video color authoring. Piet features an interactive palette to visually represent color distributions, support controllable focus levels, and enable quick theme probing via grouped color shifts. We interviewed 6 domain experts to identify the frustrations in current tools and inform the design of Piet. An in-lab user study with 13 expert designers showed that Piet effectively simplified the MG video color authoring and reduced the friction in creative color theme exploration.

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BibTeX


        @inproceedings{shi2024piet,
          author = {Shi, Xinyu and Wang, Yinghou and Wang, Yun and Zhao, Jian},
          title = {Piet: Facilitating Color Authoring for Motion Graphics Video},
          year = {2024},
          isbn = {979-8-4007-0330-0/24/05},
          publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
          address = {New York, NY, USA},
          url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642711},
          doi = {10.1145/3613904.3642711},
          booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
          numpages = {17},
          location = {Honolulu, HI, USA},
          series = {CHI '24}
        }