It has all the bad qualities of a powerpoint presentation - lots of chartjunk and a very low data/ink ratio. Abstract pictures like these are a kind of IQ trap

It has all the bad qualities of a powerpoint presentation - lots of chartjunk and a very low data/ink ratio. Abstract pictures like these are a kind of IQ trap because the author never explains what many of the lines actually represent. Smart readers may find some way to make sense of them but it's unlikely that any two readers will be able to come up with compatible definitions that lead to useful analysis. I think if Marshall Clemens expressed those 5 web pages as 5 paragraphs, you would see that he's either not really saying much or is saying something that has plenty of counterexamples that aren't apparent in the pretty picture. For example, it's kind of ironic that I find none of the diagrams live up to the claims he makes about his Visual Models™ here http://www.idiagram.com/CP/visualmodels.html http://www.idiagram.com/CP/visualmodels.html