Colour picking: the pecking order of form and function

Multimedia presentation generation has to be able to balance the functional aspects of a presentation that address the information needs of the user, and its aesthetic form. We demonstrate our approach using automatic colour design for which we integrate relevant aspects of colour theory. Colour selection takes the relative importance of form and function into account through the use of weights in the generation process. We do not provide a definition of the relative importance of form versus function, but seek to explore the roles of subjective elements in the generation process.