As a creative act, design aims at achieving innovative solutions to fulfill the requirements provided in the problem definition. In recent years, computational methods began to be used not only in design presentation but also in solution generation. The study proposes a design methodology for a particular basic design problem on the concept of emphasis. The developed methodology generates solution alternatives by carrying out genetic operations used in evolutionary design. The generated alternatives are evaluated by an objective function comprising an artificial neural network. The creative potential of the methodology is appraised by comparing the outputs of test runs with the student works for the same design task. In doing so, three different groups of students with diverse backgrounds are used.