Creating harmonious and legible colour schemes in the automated generation of multimedia presentations

Due to the growing amount of information on the web, the user specific requirements and different characteristics of output devices, the opportunities for the automatic generation of multimedia presentations grow. The multimedia presentation generator, that resides in a dynamic environment, such as a museum website, where the user requirements, presentation device characteristics, presentation content and the domain characteristics are not known in advance, needs to be able to compose a presentation. With respect to stylistic design, graphic designers can create a template providing stylistic aspects, but as soon as any of the dynamic attributes of the system change this can result in the need for redesign. We argue that with the correct balance between form and function and by using relevant aspects of design theory, the automatic presentation generator can keep harmony and legibility factors in balance. The aim of this work is to demonstrate this approach on the example of automatic colour design with the use of colour theory from Itten and Tufte. By taking required legibility factors into account, harmonious and well balanced colour schemes, adapted to the requirements of the user, the characteristics of the presentation platform, the content's domain and discourse model can be created. We apply our approach to the domain of presentation environments for musea for fine arts. 1998 ACM Computing Classification System: H5.4, Architectures, Navigation, User issues; I7.2 Hypertext/hypermedia, Multi/mixed media.