Some specifics about research and teaching statements Thanks to Internet and this site, in particular, I have a pretty good overall idea about contents and style, expected from research and teaching statements. As a potential postdoc or junior faculty member, who has recently defended dissertation, currently I'm updating my research and teaching statements to clarify my approach to teaching (so far I have teaching experience only in a form of informal tutoring (various disciplines) and corporate learning) as well as my research agenda.

With that in mind, I'm curious about what people on the Academia site think about advantages and disadvantages of the inclusion into the documents a small number of the following components (I've seen a number of examples of doing that):


(research statement) visual elements (hopefully, tasteful - light matching colors and LaTeX), such as a lightweight framework or simply a diagram, depicting current and future research areas of interest, their potential interaction as well as types of expected research outcomes;
(research statement) references to the appropriate literature (very brief review);
(teaching statement) appropriate quotes from general and scientific literature.
I can tell you about what's normal in math.  


It's uncommon to depict your research areas in the form of a diagram.  However, if you are studying interconnections between different kinds of objects, say, a diagram may be appropriate.  Of course figures/tables/graphs can be very useful in illustrating your research.  If you include a diagram, it should be worth more than filling the same amount of space with text.
References to the literature are standard, and makes your research statement look more professional.  I don't think people actually go look up these references, but if they know the area, they may check to see what papers you refer to.
One or two quotes is fine, if they truly express a key point better than you can yourself, but more is not a good idea.  The more quotes you have means the less you personally have to say, and this is supposed to be a personal statement on teaching.  (Quotes from student evaluations etc are a different matter.)


In any case, it's a good idea to have colleagues/mentors that you trust take a look over your application material for feedback.  This way they can let you know if you've done something crazy, or if things are just unclear.