PosterIQ: A Design Perspective Benchmark for Poster Understanding and Generation

We present PosterIQ, a design-driven benchmark for poster understanding and generation, annotated across composition structure, typographic hierarchy, and semantic intent. It includes 7,765 image–annotation instances and 822 generation prompts spanning real, professional, and synthetic cases. To bridge visual design cognition and generative modeling, we define tasks for layout parsing, text–image correspondence, typography/readability and font perception, design quality assessment, and controllable, composition-aware generation with metaphor. We evaluate state-of-the-art MLLMs and diffusion-based generators, finding persistent gaps in visual hierarchy, typographic semantics, saliency control, and intention communication; commercial models lead on high-level reasoning but act as insensitive automatic raters, while generators render text well yet struggle with composition-aware synthesis. Extensive analyses show PosterIQ is both a quantitative benchmark and a diagnostic tool for design reasoning, offering reproducible, task-specific metrics. We aim to catalyze models' creativity and integrate human-centred design principles into generative vision–language systems.