Abstract: There are many possible 2D views of a given 3D object and most people would agree that some views are more aesthetic and/or more "informative" than others. Thus, it would be very useful, in many applications, to be able to automatically compute these "best" views. Although all measures of the quality of a view will ultimately be subjective, hence difficult to quantify, we propose some general principles which may be used to address this challenge. In particular, we describe a number of different ways to measure the goodness of a view, and show how to optimize these measures by reducing the size of the search space.