Hermitian symmetric spaces have played a distinguished role in the history of representation theory and they continue to be a source of beautiful and often surprising results. In this talk, I will use a natural generalization of Young diagrams for Hermitian symmetric spaces to give a concrete and uniform approach to a wide variety of interconnected topics including non-compact roots and canonical reduced expressions, abelian ideals in a Borel subalgebra, rational smoothness of Schubert varieties in co-minuscule flag varieties, equivalences of categories of highest weight modules, BGG resolutions, and syzygies of determinantal ideals.