Mark Boulton

A few weeks ago, Five Simple Steps — the small, indi pub­lisher I’m a co-founder of — released our second title; A Prac­tical Guide to Inform­a­tion Archi­tec­ture by Donna Spen­cer. Derek Feath­er­stone, who wrote a won­der­ful fore­word for Donna, sum­mar­ised his feel­ings in one clos­ing sentence:

This is the book that I needed 10 years ago.

I com­pletely agree with him. And here’s why: this book makes you feel like an inform­a­tion archi­tect. It makes you feel empowered with a sense of clar­ity and pur­pose that you can bring to your pro­jects. No other IA book I’ve read made me feel like that.

I think I first came across the term IA in about 1999. I’d just star­ted work­ing for Agency.com in Lon­don and was partnered with a guy (sorry, I for­get his name now), who ‘used to be a designer’, but was now an ‘IA’. I really did learn a lot from him dir­ectly. I learnt that Inform­a­tion Archi­tec­ture can be a slow, tedi­ous prac­tice. It’s often about mak­ing hard decisions and arm­ing your­self with the *facts* before you do. I learnt that it was vital in a pro­ject, but per­haps most import­antly, I learnt that good IA is not a quest for per­fec­tion. It’s about get­ting in there, mak­ing mis­takes and then iterating. 

Get­ting your hands dirty

Every year in the UK, there is a hor­ti­cul­tural show in Chelsea; the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. The BBC, as always, does a stirl­ing job at cov­er­ing the event over the course of about a week. As you’d expect, there are a bunch of well-known faces present­ing the pro­ceed­ings, my favour­ite being Christine Walk­den — an ener­getic, pas­sion­ate gardener with a won­der­ful turn of phrase. This year — whilst sit­ting on a park bench, dis­cuss­ing the dif­fer­ence between garden design­ers and garden­ers with Alan Titch­marsh — she said some­thing that will stick with me a long while:

You have to spend some time with grit under your fingernails

This phrase really stuck with me. There really is no sub­sti­tute for get­ting stuck in, mak­ing mis­takes, learn­ing from them and then try­ing it all again. To get stuck in, you need to have the con­fid­ence to do so. And that’s what Donna’s book will give you; the con­fid­ence to spend some time with grit under your fingernails.

A Prac­tical Guide to Inform­a­tion Archi­tec­ture is avail­able to buy now as a down­load­able PDF, ePub and pre­order paper­back from Five Simple Steps from as little as £12.