Auto-Icon+: An Automated End-to-End Code Generation Tool for Icon Designs in UI Development

Abstract

Approximately 50% of development resources are devoted to user interface (UI) development tasks [9]. Occupying a large proportion of development resources, developing icons can be a time-consuming task, because developers need to consider not only effective implementation methods but also easy-to-understand descriptions. In this article, we present Auto-Icon+, an approach for automatically generating readable and efficient code for icons from design artifacts. According to our interviews to understand the gap between designers (icons are assembled from multiple components) and developers (icons as single images), we apply a heuristic clustering algorithm to compose the components into an icon image. We then propose an approach based on a deep learning model and computer vision methods to convert the composed icon image to fonts with descriptive labels, thereby reducing the laborious manual effort for developers and facilitating UI development. We quantitatively evaluate the quality of our method in the real-world UI development environment and demonstrate that our method offers developers accurate, efficient, readable, and usable code for icon designs, in terms of saving 65.2% implementing time.