The 28th Annual Graph Drawing Contest, a long running tradition of the graph drawing research community, was held in conjunction with the 29th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2021), hosted in Tübingen from the 14th to the 17th of September, 2021.
The contest is comprised of various categories. In the creative topics participants are provided with network data and tasked to design an informative but at the same time aesthetically pleasing layout of these networks.

In this category TU Wien was represented by two submissions, both of which were created as part of the coursework for the lecture Graph Drawing Algorithms (taught by Martin Nöllenburg and Soeren Nickel), with resounding success, winning a first and a joint second prize.
Both groups chose the task of visualizing a graph of movie remakes by different directors out of the available data sets.

The 1st prize winners with their advisor (from left to right): Thorsten Korpitsch, David Ammer and Simon Pointner and Soeren Nickel.	The 2nd prize winners with their advisors (from left to right): Martin Nöllenburg, Daniela Martinez Duarte, Najla Amira Ochoa Leonor and Soeren Nickel.

Movie Remakes Through Time

David Ammer, Thorsten Korpitsch and Simon Pointner won the first prize by choosing a design, which puts the focus of the visualization firmly on the movies and representing directors as spanning trees between movie nodes. Readability was automatically optimized, by minimizing crossings and edge lengths via simulated annealing. The design was praised for being intuitive and highly informative.

A Film Festival

Najla Amira Ochoa Leonor and Daniela Martinez Duarte won the second prize with their multi-style visualization, utilizing a clustering of directors based on their influence. It shows high degree directors as meta-nodes depicting their remakes and original movies and an essential list of movies connecting them through a Steiner tree is highlighted. Beyond trying to explore structures not immediately visible in the data set, the design was lauded for being aesthetically pleasing.

The winning design by David Ammer, Thorsten Korpitsch and Simon Pointner.	The second place design by Najla Amira Ochoa Leonor and Daniela Martinez Duarte.

Manual Live Challenge

In the manual live challenge category, contestants tried to optimize the polyline edge-length ratio of planar drawings on a fixed grid, wherein the group of Soeren Nickel, Anaïs Villedieu and Jules Wulms of the Algorithms and Complexity group won the third price.

Congratulations to all awardees!