Abstract: A method and apparatus is provided for displaying nested rectangles which graphically illustrate the directories and files located in a storage medium such a computer hard disk drive or the nodes of a tree data structure. The sizes of the rectangles are proportional to the size of the directory or file they represent, and the rectangles are nested in a recursive manner in accordance with the branch structure of the directories and files on the storage media. Preferably, the dimensions of the rectangles are chosen to maximize the number of rectangles, especially those capable of displaying the names of the directories and files. Yet further, the invention preferably assigns colors to the rectangles based upon certain criteria and suppresses directories or files from being shown if their rectangles will be too small to be accurately perceived.