By modifying the method of de Fraysseix et al., Brandenburg (2008) found an embedding of any planar graph into a triangular subset of the grid consisting of 4n2/9 points.
The smallest known universal point sets are not based on grids, but are instead constructed from superpatterns (permutations that contain all permutation patterns of a given size); the universal point sets constructed in this way have size n2/4 − Θ(n).
Less obviously, every set of n points in general position (no three collinear) remains universal for outerplanar graphs.
[7] Planar 3-trees have universal point sets of size O(n3/2 log n); the same bound also applies to series–parallel graphs.
[9] By using a similar layout, every strictly convex curve in the plane can be shown to contain an n-point subset that is universal for polyline drawing with at most one bend per edge.