The great Massimo Vignelli:
Personally I feel I no longer have anything to share with the so-called graphic design of today: not the concept, not the typefaces, not the layout—nothing. Therefore, I conclude that I am no longer a graphic designer, but an information architect, and from now on that is how I will describe the meaning of my work and the scope of my activity. For me, to be an information architect means to organize information in a way that is essentially retrievable, understandable, visually captivating, emotionally involving, and easily identifiable. Information should be semantically rooted, syntactically correct, pragmatically efficient. It doesn’t work otherwise.
This is very similar to the Seth Godin bit I just posted. Vignelli seems to be trying to distance himself from the brand-whore, trend-driven aesthetic world the public thinks of when it things of “design”, and he’s doing so by re-framing himself as an information architect. But really, he’s always been an information architect, and information architecture is design. Massimo can certainly call himself any damn thing he pleases at this point — but personally, I just wish the public understood that design isn’t purely aesthetic-driven, so we didn’t have to resort to calling ourselves something besides “designers.”
Sidenote: it’s interesting that a term, “information architecture”, which came almost entirely out of web and interactive work, is now being applied to someone who does almost entirely print and static work. I love it when language works like that. Update: Wilson Miner tells me this article was probably written before the therm “information architecture” become some predominantly associated with the web. My bad.
001 // bec // 08.07.2008 // 11:29 AM
“information architecture is design”
Sure, information architecture is a type of design, but not necessarily visual design. I very much appreciate your points about how design goes beyond visual elements, but I also think that graphic designers aren’t “information architects” unless they’re going beyond “arranging elements” and are instead working with structuring content within a resource as a whole—whether it’s a printed page, a book, a web site, etc—and talking about the elements themselves. Information architects have an involvement with their projects that is more about determining content, content structure, and navigation than about determining, say, page layouts.