Everything About Me
Danzico is part information architect, part usability analyst, and part editor. As an independent information architecture consultant, she traces the roots of her craft back to her parents. According to Liz, “Growing up at least a little information architect in Northeastern Pennsylvania gave me an organizational advantage over my friends.”
Work
Today, Liz spends her days in Brooklyn where she organizes information for websites of all shapes and sizes. She structures web experiences as an information architect with Happy Cog Studios in New York. She structures editorial processes as senior development editor with Rosenfeld Media. And she’s on the board of directors of the New York chapter of AIGA, and the advisory board for the Information Architecture Institute.
For nearly seven years, Liz was involved with Boxes and Arrows, a magazine for information architects, most recently as editor-in-chief. During that time, Liz was director of experience strategy for AIGA, responsible for the user experience of the national web presence and all online and New Riders publications.
She’s headed up information architecture teams at Barnes & Noble.com and Razorfish New York. She’s directed product development at Daylife and Rodale Digital. She’s taught at the New School University, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Columbia University.
School
Liz got into information architecture by planned coincidence. Planning to be a writer, Liz received a degree in English from Pennsylvania State University, where her interest in design started with writing and designing newsletters in PageMaker. After a brief career as an English teacher, she received a masters in Professional Writing from Carnegie Mellon University — a shared program between the Humanities Department and the Design School. It was at CMU that she discovered information architecture.
Leaving a life of writing user manuals for telephones and washing machines, Liz packed up in early 1999 and moved to New York.
Colophon
“Bobulate” comes from an email exchange Liz had with a friend which tracked lists of words that sounded better without their prefixes and/or suffixes. The original list didn’t live on (mostly due to the days of POP), but the name did. Standing for intentional organization; to be thrown into order, as if against one’s will, it is just the opposite of “discombobulated.”
This site was designed by the good, and terribly talented, Khoi Vinh from a set of wireframes. The agreement to redesign the site came somewhat reluctantly, when Liz parted with the old site — a mock set of wireframes itself. The integration with WordPress was masterfully done by Jeremy Zilar — an offer he put forth before he even redesigned his own site. There is endless eternal gratitude to both of them.
Other
Liz grew up in a small town near Scranton where her parents sent her to Catholic school and managed her chores on spreadsheets on the refrigerator. It was early on that she was taught that organization is a virtue. She hasn’t looked back since.
Liz’s apartment contains one cello, one vizsla, one piano, one sewing machine, and seventeen pairs of sneakers. She’s often heard promising that she will write a book, become a better photographer, move to California, and learn how to say no.