  Aesthetics are often used to evaluate the quality of graph drawings. However,
the existing aesthetic criteria are useful in judging the extents to which a
drawing conforms to particular drawing rules. They have limitations in
evaluating overall quality. Currently the overall quality of graph drawings is
mainly evaluated based on personal judgments and user studies. Personal
judgments are not reliable, while user studies can be costly to run. Therefore,
there is a need for a direct measure of overall quality. 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. In an attempt to meet
this need, we propose a measure that measures overall quality based on
aggregation of individual aesthetic criteria. We present a user study that
validates this measure and demonstrates its capacity in predicting the
performance of human graph comprehension. The implications of the proposed
measure for future research are discussed.
