It's late, so I don't want to spend a lot of time going into detail, but:

• David Wood started the day with the best paper talk, on his results on crossing numbers. The key tool is to "blow up" planar graphs by replacing vertices with constant sized cliques and edges by constant sized bicliques, and then take minors. Let $$P(k)$$ denote the family of $$n$$-vertex graphs that are minors of $$k$$-blowups of $$n$$-vertex planar graphs; then he showed that any minor-closed family is a subset of some $$P(k)$$, and that a bounded degree graph has linear crossing number if and only if it's in some $$P(k)$$ (with $$k$$ depending on the constant of linearity and the degree). Therefore, bounded degree graphs excluding a fixed minor have linear crossing number. I'm probably not doing the results justice so go read the paper.

• Helen Purchase gave a nice talk on usability studies for graph animations. I would like to see more work like this; it's good to see some grounding for all our theory.

• Oliver Deussen gave an invited presentation with many beautiful computer-generated plant pictures, including some amazing 3d watercolor non-photorealistic renderings.

• We had a very pleasant banquet filled with too much good food of too many different types at the city palace, not letting out until around midnight.

• Oh, and I gave two back-to-back talks, on drawing learning spaces and selecting colors for vertices in graph drawings. The color one seems likely to have many other possible applications, for instance for coloring lines in metro map layout (the subject of the other two talks in the same session) and I heard later from Ulrik Brandes some very interesting ideas about using spectral methods for the color choice.