Scot,
Thanks once again for the feedback. I think that the layout is important to the readability of the diagrams, don't you? I've also found that the diagrams seem to grow organically, particularly if you're working on agile projects. ORM lends itself really nicely to design treaking in this way, but the diagrams in VEA don't, because if you cut and paste the diagram, you get another object.
What I have been doing in general is having the central entity in the middle of the page, it's entites and values to the right, and its parent entities to the left. In general, that seems to work quite nicely, I was just interested in how others lay out their diagrams; thank you for letting me know how you do yours!
I'm also looking for ways to introduce a prescriptive way to use ORM in a project, to document that process for any teams to use.
Cheers,
Martin.