by Julie Compton
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When she was eight years old, Liz Danzico – future information design consultant and AIGA advisory board member – sat in front of the keyboard of her father’s room-sized Hewlett-Packard, slowly typing child-like commands into the system and watching them print out on its archaic dot-matrix printer.

“This is control,” she realized excitedly. “I can make technology do what I want.”

Years later, Danzico consults major companies on how to make their technology do what they want, but with a matured perspective.

“My [interest in information systems] has evolved so that now I’m studying people, trying to understand how technology meets, or doesn’t meet, the needs they have,” she says.

It’s what she calls control over technology “with a purpose.”

Her left- and right-brain thinking and never-ending awareness of people and objects led her to fall hopelessly in love with information design as a graduate student in Carnegie Mellon’s Professional Writing program, which focuses on technical communication and information design. She had a brief stint writing product manuals for washers and dryers after graduation before packing up for New York City, where she landed a position as an information designer with Razorfish, which proved to be a major stepping stone to her current career as an independent consultant.

Among her major accomplishments, Danzico was recruited by Barnes and Noble to head the interface design of its website and has sat on the boards of both AIGA and the IA Institute, a high honor in the design community.

Finding it difficult to pursue the projects she juggled while keeping a full-time position, she inevitably moved on to an independent consultant career, working from her Brooklyn-based studio where she now creates and shapes her own schedule and projects.

“I never really set out to be an independent consultant,” she says. “But one day, I found that my extracurricular projects started getting in the way of my full-time job.”

As a woman in a male-dominated profession, Danzico says she would be naïve to think gender doesn’t impact her.

“Gender affects me—both positively and negatively,” she says. “It sometimes gives me opportunities I may not have otherwise gotten, and denies me opportunities I should have. But for me personally, the discrepancies have zeroed out at this point, so I think I’m left with a pretty fair result.”

Her advice to young women looking to pursue careers in information design is to turn to both formal and informal resources, since the profession is relatively new and constantly evolving both in and outside of academic arenas.

Among these include studying information design through programs like the School of Visual Art’s (SVA) new MFA in Information Design, for which Danzico is both co-founder and chairperson. She also advises joining online mailing lists that are both educational resources and social networking tools for anyone looking to pursue a career in the field.

Danzico is currently busy reviewing student applications for the SVA’s MFA in Information Design program, consulting clients, and spending time with her dog Lucy.

When asked where she sees herself in 10 years, she throws out neuroscience as a possibility, but with her tendency to evolve it’s hard to be certain.

To learn more about Liz, visit her blog at bobulate.com.