A system for arranging searchable items, such as digital images or multimedia icons for presentation on a graphical user interface. The system has an optimizer module which minimizes a cost function for arranging items in a layout space and is applied to one or more predetermined characteristics of the items. The optimizer module also creates a mixture distribution by considering each item as having a spatial distribution in the layout space and controls the entropy of the mixture distribution in order to maximize the extent to which each item occupies a separate position in the layout space. A Renderer module then renders the layouts to generate a display.