12.1. Guidelines for Diagramming an Information Architecture

Information architects are under extreme pressure to clearly represent the product of their work. Whether it’s to help sell the value of information architecture to a potential client or to explain a design to a colleague, information architects rely upon visual representations to communicate what it is they actually do.

And yet information architectures, as we’ve mentioned many times, are abstract, conceptual things. Sites themselves are not finite; often you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Subsites and the “invisible web” of databases further muddy the picture of what should and shouldn’t be included in a specific architecture. Digital information itself can be organized and repurposed in an almost infinite number of ways, meaning that an architecture is typically multidimensional—and therefore exceedingly difficult to represent in a two-dimensional space such as a whiteboard or a sheet of paper.