The LED Diagram Layout Challenge


Electronic Communications of the EASST
Volume 7 (2007)

Proceedings of the Workshop on the
Layout of (Software) Engineering Diagrams

(LED 2007)

The LED Diagram Layout Challenge

Harald Störrle

1 pages

Guest Editors: Andrew Fish, Alexander Knapp, Harald Störrle
Managing Editors: Tiziana Margaria, Julia Padberg, Gabriele Taentzer
ECEASST Home Page: http://www.easst.org/eceasst/ ISSN 1863-2122

http://www.easst.org/eceasst/


ECEASST

The LED Diagram Layout Challenge

Harald Störrle

Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, Österreich
Harald.Stoerrle@uibk.ac.at

The gift of laying out diagrams beautifully is a precious one. And, apparently, the gift of spot-
ting bad layouts is equally rare, for even in respected journals there are extremely bad layouts.

But what exactly is a good layout? And how can we achieve them? Well, let’s learn from the
experts and have a look at their work! To this end, we will stage THE LED DIAGRAM LAYOUT
CHALLENGE between the participants of this workshop.

With this semi-serious event, the first of its kind, we aim at improving our understanding of
the qualities of layouts and how to achieve them practically.

The Rules

1. Participants of the workshops team up into 4 groups of 2–4 people.

2. All the teams are provided with a flipchart and pens.

3. A series of badly laid out diagram is presented to all groups.

4. The challenge is to improve this layout in a very limited amount of time (around 5 minutes,
depending on the complexity of the task at hand).

5. When the time is up, the groups presents their layouts and explain their improvements and
techniques.

All layouts and a summary of the explanations will be posted on the web for future reference.

1 Volume 7 (2007)

mailto:Harald.Stoerrle@uibk.ac.at