I am new to Pd, have been working with it for a few months now.

In development I often create a patch which works fine and has a nice layout on screen. Then I want to use it as a sub-patch/abstraction in a main patch and make use of the "graph on parent" feature to give a nice simple GUI on the main patch. My problem is that then to put all the controls I want into the graph on parent area involves moving these in the sub-patch which then makes the layout of that much more difficult to see with many crossed wires.

I guess there isn't one simple answer to this, but does anyone have any helpful tips to enable a clean looking sub-patch and neat GUI? On one occasion I made the GUI layout separately and then used lots of [send] and [receive] objects to send the messages within the sub-patch to graph on parent GUI area. These seems an OK approach, but still a little messy. Any other ideas? - Many thanks