Everything About Liz
Danzico is part designer, part educator, and part editor. As an independent information architecture and user experience 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
Inquiries via:
132 W 21 Street
Floor 6
New York 10011
USA
Today, Liz spends her days in Brooklyn where she organizes information of all shapes and sizes. She is an independent consultant, and user experience consultant for Happy Cog Studios. She is chairperson of the MFA in Interaction Design program, which welcomed its first class in Fall 2009 at the School of Visual Arts, and co-founded the program with Steven Heller. She’s a columnist for Interactions Magazine, on the editorial board for Rosenfeld Media, a publisher of user experience books, and the advisory board for Design Ignites Change.
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 also had the honor of serving as officer for the New York board of AIGA, and two terms as advisory board member for the Information Architecture Institute.
She’s headed up information architecture teams at Barnes & Noble.com and Razorfish New York. She helped with editorial processes for Rosenfeld Media. 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 and moved to New York.
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 five pairs of sneakers. She’s often heard promising that she will write a book, become a better photographer, move to California Berlin, and learn how to say no.
Etymology
Timeline:
Bobulate Vol. 3
Bobulate Vol. 2
Bobulate Vol. 1
“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, but the name did. Standing for “intentional organization;” to be thrown into order, as if against one’s will, if it were a real word, it would mean the opposite of “discombobulated.”
Colophon
The lovely typeface is Skolar, which was designed by David Březina and is distributed by TypeTogether. It was designed with “scholarly and multilingual publications in mind. It incorporates a subtle personal style, neither neutral nor conspicuous,” exactly what Bobulate portends to do. The illustration of the red dog in the logo mark stands in for Liz's own vizsla, Lucy.
The simple and clean site design was masterfully done by Liz's close friend Jason Santa Maria. He is truly a professional. The site was moved in one swift motion by the talented Chris Lea. Without the grace of Typekit, the ease of use of Tumblr, and the speed and customer service of Media Temple the site wouldn't have come together at all.
Liz keeps all of her ideas in sketchbooks (list format, of course), until they're ready to be claimed, when they move to Backpack's writeboards. She writes best on the F train between Brooklyn and Manhattan.
