Expressive Authoring of Node-Link Diagrams With Graphies

Expressive design environments enable visualization designers not only to specify chart types and visual mappings, but also to customize individual graphical marks, as they would in a vector graphics drawing tool. Prior work has mainly investigated how to support the expressive design of a wide range of charts generated from tabular data: bar charts, scatterplots, maps, etc. We focus here on an expressive design environment for node-link diagrams generated from multivariate networks. Such data structures raise specific challenges and opportunities in terms of visual design and interactive authoring. We discuss those specificities and describe the user-centered design process that led to Graphies, a prototype environment for expressive node-link diagram authoring. We then report on a study in which participants successfully reproduced several expressive designs, and created their own designs as well.