Related Fields

There are many fields in which the placement or layout of symbolic components is an integral part. Some of these include:

Cartography:

the placement of point, line, area, and text features such that spatial relationships mimic those of the depicted geography. Density and level of detail for the symbols and structures vary based on the map scale. Map design can be viewed as data-driven placement with some distortion and filtering options.

VLSI Design:

Designing a chip or integrated circuit involves placing components in a (generally) non-overlapping layout (also called floorplanning), where the main goals include minimizing the area and cost of intercommunication [43]. VLSI design would be categorized as a structure-driven placement task, with space-filling heuristics (and others) augmenting the process.

Graph Drawing:

nearly identical to structure-based glyph placement, except for the use of a glyph as a node representation and that, in graph drawing, the structure (links) is almost always depicted explicitly.

Interface Design:

strategies for placement of components in a graphical user interface have ranged from highly structured (e.g., following a style guide) to haphazard. Proximity and the use of white space can be effective in controlling a user's attention and making interfaces easier to learn [36,38]. algorithmically. Given a structural description of the relationships between components or a semantic distance between all pairs of components, several of the algorithms used for glyph placement could be applied to the design of interfaces.