Automating Layouts Bring Flipboard’s Magazine Style To Web And Windows

This fascinating post by Charles Ying, a lead developer at Flipboard, details the complex process of automating page layouts while maintaining some degree of art direction.

First, Duplo [the layout engine] compares the contents’ structure against the layout’s content slots to see how closely it matches. Next, Duplo computes the best pairings of content with slots by optimizing a fitness function built on dozens of individually weighted heuristics. Some of these heuristics are page flow, the amount of text to fill the given frame, content coherence across window resizes, and image feature detection, aspect ratio, scale and crop.