Graph drawing research traditionally focuses on producing geometric
embeddings of graphs satisfying various aesthetic constraints. After the
geometric embedding is specified, there is an additional step that is often
overlooked or ignored: assigning display colors to the graph's vertices. We
study the additional aesthetic criterion of assigning distinct colors to
vertices of a geometric graph so that the colors assigned to adjacent vertices
are as different from one another as possible. We formulate this as a problem
involving perceptual metrics in color space and we develop algorithms for
solving this problem by embedding the graph in color space. We also present an
application of this work to a distributed load-balancing visualization problem.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures. To appear at 14th Int. Symp. Graph Drawing, 200
