[igraph] Graph Visualization

[Lorenzo Isella]

Dear All,
I would like a piece of advice about how to visualize graphs. I know
very little about this; I simply browsed through the igraph site. I
understood that different conditions may make a certain visualization
technique more or less appropriate.
This is what I am using igraph for and what I aim at:
(1) I study the aggregation of particles which form large clusters by
sticking together. I have a time-dependent adjacency matrix, which I
save as time progresses.
(2)I look for the connected components of the non-directed graph.
Initially, I have 5000 distinguished connected components (each
consisting of a single vertex; each particle is a vertex)
(3) As time progresses, I have fewer and fewer connected components
since most of the particles end up in a few large clusters. At the
end, I have about 70 connected components.
(4) I would like to take several "snapshots" of the graph to visualize
what is going on, but I am quite unsure about what I should use, if it
is possible to have different colors for each node depending on its
degree and so on.

Any suggestion by the experienced people on this list is appreciated.
Kind Regards

Lorenzo