The beauty of Information Architecture

IRConcept, originally uploaded by kaioshin.

As I've been sorting through my portfolio of work, I've found that my later work with Sapient was disappointing.

"You've been getting lazy, man." Nico pointed out.

And it's true, in a way. The profession has been so overwhelmed by (so-called) IA's who don't consider themselves Designers, first and foremost -- if at all.

As a result, you can do a few lazy diagrams and clients will say "Wow! We thought IA's only did wireframes"

There used to be a debate about Big-IA vs. Little-IA, but I think little-IA's have won the battle, because the Big-IA's spent too much time navel-gazing instead of coming up with an industry-wide definition of what should be expected of an Information Architect's skills.

I learned about Information Architecture from Studio Archetype, where it was called Information Design -- which is exactly what it is.

I challenge all the Visio wireframe engineers out there to do something beautiful.

...

In response to Nico's challenge, I pushed myself to present some 'real' design in the work I've been doing for a client. I've posted an example of a concept describing the core brand positioning of a service, and how the service would be perceived by its target audience groups.

Of course this could have been done with two venn diagrams as well.