Abstract: The traditional way of depicting network data, text+data sheet, can not meet the requirement of analyzing and managing the increasingly-larger network dataset. As an effective tool of assisting users' understanding the network structure, as well as mining the connotative information, network visualization techniques arc widely applied nowadays.In the beginning of this paper,we summarized the tasks of network visualization. After the review of graph drawing aesthetics related works, the rationales and characters of representative methods were expatiated on each category of a taxonomy framework of network visualization. Afterwards, the strategy of solution to the scalability of network visualization was recapitulated. And a comparison of technictues on each category was presented in the end, followed by an expectation of future work and challenges of network visualization faced.

Key words: Network(Graph) visualization, Drawing aesthetics, Network(Graph) visualization task, Information visualization