Nancy Duarte, visual thinking book author and consultant, earlier this week launched Diagrammer, a searchable database of 4,000 business diagram templates that you can purchase and download for only 99 cents each.

Dan Roam, author of the visual mapping books The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas With Pictures and Blah, Blah, Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work, compares the process of visual thinking to the process of carving a faceted diamond out of a rough piece of the crystalline substance. This is a very powerful analogy.

Visual thinking is an essential executive skill today. If you want to keep up with the latest thinking on this fascinating topic, why not follow these 10 visual thinking experts on Twitter?

Visual thinking is quickly growing in importance as a strategy for attacking difficult business problems. But what’s driving this need and why should you learn about it?

One of the best business development strategies you can use to grow your core business is to look beyond it for adjacent markets, technologies or areas of focus where you can expand. Here’s how to do it visually.

Mind mapping is only one flavor of visual thinking. Here’s a challenge to “think visual” – to engage in out-of-the-box thinking to further your career and your life, using more of the tools at your disposal.

Dan Roam’s new book explores visual techniques for helping us to bring greater clarity and impact to our communications – and to avoid “death by detail.”

Linkedin has evolved into a popular platform for forming groups where professionals can ask questions, get answers and discuss topics and issues of mutual interest. Here are 7 worthwhile groups focused on mind mapping and visual thinking.

If you want to be able to express yourself more compellingly in writing and visually, then you really ought to pick up a copy of Writing for Visual Thinkers by Andrea Marks.

Dan Roam, in his new book Unfolding the Napkin: The Hands-on Method for Solving Complex Problems with Simple Pictures, shares a series of questions that you can use to refine and improve your visual thinking. This simple process is very applicable to creating and refining the content of a mind map.