For a drawing style in which the vertices are placed on the integer lattice, the area of the drawing may be defined as the area of the smallest axis-aligned bounding box of the drawing: that is, it the product of the largest difference in x-coordinates of two vertices with the largest difference in y-coordinates.
[3][4] Binary trees, and trees of bounded degree more generally, have drawings with linear or near-linear area, depending on the drawing style.
[12][13] However, drawing series–parallel graphs requires an area larger than n multiplied by a superpolylogarithmic factor, even if edges can be drawn as polylines.
[14] In contrast to these polynomial bounds, some drawing styles may exhibit exponential growth in their areas, implying that these styles may be suitable only for small graphs.
[15] Even plane trees may require exponential area, if they are to be drawn with straight edges that preserve a fixed cyclic order around each vertex and must be equally spaced around the vertex.