Yes, empirical evidence does point to “picture saying a thousand words” and I do think its true. But one must not disregard the power of written word. You and I write using words. Your blog is a set of words, not pictures. People still read it. Just as you can have badly written documents, you can have badly drawn diagrams as well and they can be equally frustrating.

The difference, if you like, lies in the ability of the author to address his/her audience. And I dont even think pictures are the best medium. I find that videos and audios are probably more powerful medium to capture important concepts. Would you go through a powerpoint deck with pictures or look at a 3 minute video with commentary from the SME where they explain a difficult concept ?

Have to agree on the sentiment. Document Driven Design can seriously knock agile projects out of kilter (especially when the client changes their mind about what they originally wrote! I don’t think developers like surprises…)

I always used pictures to convey ideas, and came to this realisation: it’s the *motion* of drawing arrows and boxes that helps people understand; not always the drawing itself. I sometimes find myself re-drawing the same picture for different audiences. Making these processes interactive always yields the best results.

In fact, our Domain Modeling tool was created to end this scourge 

Cheers.
Vijay