Editorial and information design
Give the material an order a reader can follow.
Ukaia is a small studio for organizations whose knowledge has outgrown its filing system. We take archives, annual reviews, research programs and member handbooks, and arrange them so that someone who has never seen them can find the way through alone.
What we believe
Order is always an argument
Every arrangement tells a reader what comes first, what can wait and what can be skipped. When nobody decides that on purpose, the material decides it by accident, and the reader pays for the accident. We would rather make the argument in the open and let you disagree with it.
- Decide on purpose
- A sequence should be chosen, written down and easy to defend. If we cannot explain why a section sits where it does, it is in the wrong place.
- Plain before clever
- Headings say what the section holds. Sentences make one claim each. We would rather be understood on the first pass than admired on the second.
- Test with a stranger
- Our own sense of a document is worth little to a reader who has never seen it. Each order we propose is checked by someone who arrives cold.
Our method
How a long document becomes readable
The figure stays in place while the steps scroll past it. It shows one set of material at each stage of our work, so you can see what every stage changes and what it leaves alone.
- Gather
- Group
- Order
- Check
Start with everything in one pile
Almost every project begins with material that is correct, complete and impossible to read. Annual reviews sit beside draft minutes. A catalogue may carry two numbering systems, and one of them was never retired. Before we arrange anything, we list all of it, including the parts nobody wants to discuss.
Name what belongs together
Grouping is the first decision that changes what a reader sees. We look for the categories people already use when they talk about the material, then test whether those categories hold up. A category that exists only in one spreadsheet tab usually fails the test. In the figure, the bars keep their heights. Only their shading changes, so the groups show before the order does.
Choose the sequence a reader needs
Order is an argument about what matters first. Chronology suits a record. Importance suits a briefing. Questions suit a handbook. We write down the reason for the sequence we choose, so that it is easy to defend and easy to change. Here the bars rise from short to tall. It is the simplest order there is, and the one most often picked without thought.
Read it the way a stranger would
A draft is finished only after someone who has never seen it finds their way through. We watch where they pause, where they skip ahead and where they stop. Each stop marks a place where the order asks too much of the reader. Those places are fixed, and the sequence is tested again before anyone calls it done.
Who we work with
The people who call us know their material too well to see it
Our clients are rarely new to their subject. They are usually the people who have lived with a collection, a program or a body of research for years, and who have quietly stopped being able to tell which parts a visitor needs first. We bring the outside view back into the room.
- Museums, libraries and archives whose collections have outgrown their first arrangement.
- Research offices whose reports have grown past the plan they started with.
- Cooperatives and member organizations that need a handbook people will actually open.
- Foundations and public bodies that publish long documents for readers they will never meet.
- Independent publishers with a serious book whose structure still feels unsettled.
What we do
Different kinds of work, one question
Every service we offer answers the same question: in what sequence should this material reach the person reading it? The answer changes with the material, the reader and the place where the order is published.
- Editorial structure: a proposed sequence, with the reasons for each position written down.
- Information architecture reviews: where readers lose the path on a website, an intranet or in an archive.
- Indexes and finding aids: built from the words your readers use, not only the words in your filing system.
- Publication design: serif-led editions in which the order of the pages is as deliberate as the look.
- Workshops: teaching your own team to make ordering decisions with their own material.
To see the underlying idea at small scale, open the sorting lab. It puts the same bars in order with four common methods and shows how each one spends its effort.
Start a conversation
Tell us what needs putting in order.
Send a short note that describes the material, the people who read it and the place where the current version goes wrong. We reply by email with a clear next step, and we will tell you plainly if we are not the right people for the job.