Drawing a clique graph with

import networkx as nx
....
nx.draw(G, layout=nx.spring_layout(G))

produces the following picture:

Obviously, the spacing between the nodes (e.g., the edge length) needs to be increased. I've googled this and found this suggestion here:

For some of the layout algorithms there is a scale parameter that might help. e.g.

import networkx as nx
G = nx.path_graph(4)
pos = nx.spring_layout(G)  # default to scale=1
nx.draw(G, pos)
pos = nx.spring_layout(G, scale=2)  # double distance between all nodes
nx.draw(G, pos)

However, the scale parameter does not seem to have any effect.

What is the right method to get a better drawing?

The solution to this problem lies in the NetworkX version 1.8 which is yet to be released, but is available via git hub.

Do the following to increase the distance between nodes:

pos = nx.spring_layout(G, k=0.15, iterations=20)
# k controls the distance between the nodes and varies between 0 and 1
# iterations is the number of times simulated annealing is run
# default k=0.1 and iterations=50

Tweak with these parameters to see how it works. But despite this there is no guarantee that all nodes are non-overlapping