The development of creativity support system is an area of active research in the realm of computer-aided design. While most existing creativity support systems aim to assist the generation of works, they often fall short in providing effective support during the creative conception stage, which can hinder the process of inspiration divergence and convergence. Chinese-style posters, in particular, require designers to select appropriate cultural elements for layout to convey specific themes and cultural connotations. This task can prove challenging for graphic designers, especially novices who may overlook the multiple metaphors of cultural elements. In turn, the solidified image schema will lead to the works becoming mere formalities and lacking cultural connotations. In order to assist designers in the construction of visual metaphors in the design of Chinese-style posters, this paper proposed key design elements and thinking paths for the construction of visual metaphors in Chinese-style posters. Using the semantic difference and crowdsourcing methods, six types of elements were constructed as “metaphor associations”, and automatic generation rules for metaphor labels in Chinese-style posters were developed based on these associations. Subsequently, a creativity support system, called “Afflatus”, was constructed to facilitate deeper thinking exploration, inspiration, and visualization of the metaphorical reasoning process. The system explicitly represented the bidirectional correlation between elements and metaphors and offers a retrieval function with “metaphor” as high-level semantic information, supporting the sample divergence across multiple design dimensions of “metaphor” “color” and “form”. Finally, through user experiments and expert interviews, the effectiveness of Afflatus was verified, demonstrating its superiority over existing systems by supporting the divergence of user inspiration across multiple dimensions while effectively enhancing the efficiency of conception and design creativity.