Another example of use of variations of Chomsky's context free grammars for describing graphic design: Chris Coyne's Context Free Design Grammars.

It is interesting that grammars, as a conceptual tool, are maintained as both practically useful and intellectually manageable by practitioners in the field of architectural and graphic design, even when they don't have a strong computer science background. In particular, this seems to suggest that:

• these people are comfortable at representing the designed artifact with a tree-like structure, as entities that are hierarchical decomposable along mereological (part-of) relations;
• structural self-similarity is an important feature of designed artifacts.

An apparent limitation of this approach is that CFG are not enough expressive to capture some important kinds of constraints between the parts of the artifacts.