An aggregation-based approach to quality evaluation of graph drawings

Aesthetics are often used to judge how good a graph drawing is in terms of specific drawing rules. A direct measurement of overall quality is missing. In this paper, we propose to evaluate quality based on aggregation of individual aesthetics. This measure can be used by visualization designers to quickly compare the quality of drawings at hand at the design stage and make decisions accordingly. We present a user study that validates this measure. The implications of the proposed measure for future research are discussed.