Emojinating - Evolving Emoji Blends.

Graphic designers visually represent concepts in several of their daily tasks, such as in icon design. Computational systems can be of help in such tasks by stimulating creativity. However, current computational approaches to concept visual representation lack in effectiveness in promoting the exploration of the space of possible solutions. In this paper, we present an evolutionary approach that combines a standard Evolutionary Algorithm with a method inspired by Estimation of Distribution Algorithms to evolve emoji blends to represent user-introduced concepts. The quality of the developed approach is assessed using two separate user-studies. In comparison to previous approaches, our evolutionary system is able to better explore the search space, obtaining solutions of higher quality in terms of concept representativeness.