Codifying Visual Representations

Making visually appealing and meaningful diagrams involves craftsmanship in designing the visual representation, drawing shapes, and laying them out. Can the effort spent on diagrams by an expert be reused by others, especially those without the expertise in design and drawing? In this paper, we outline our prior work on Penrose, a diagramming tool with first-class support for reusing visual representations. The nature of our approach to reusability necessitates a domain-agnostic method to automatically lay out a diagram. We highlight our existing approach for general diagram layout and styling, and propose a new composable approach for codifying visual representations to reuse expertise that cuts across domains.