Info-Tech Research Group is a research and advisory company, serving over 30,000 IT professionals. I worked there as a designer reponsible for interactive content specializing in UX and web design. Software Directories is sort of a yellow pages for all software that Info-Tech can provide research on. A massive digital phone book so to speak. This tied in with a massive undertaking in the company called Software Reviews, which would house all the reviews and actual research of these software. This page is active today at [softwarereviews.com](http://softwarereviews.com/).
visit live site →Initial ideas ranged from actually making icons out of the hexagons to just an overload of information where all the logos were shown on the front page to a sort of period table of software. On top of this we knew that this all had to be easily editable and repeatable as the goal was to make dozens of these reports in the next year and doing them by hand was not sustainable.
While attempting to organize all these software and directories and figure out just exactly what this project was going to become, I realized that we needed to create a sort of guide for ourselves on how to make new directories. We decided on some parameters: there would be two main entry points, horizontal directories and vertical directories. Verticals would include many more software as they were primarily industries, while horizontals would include different parts of those industries and be much smaller. Verticals would have dark backgrounds and horizontals would have light ones. Verticals would also include extra pages in the report, that narrowed them down even more into smaller sections.
I created an area to house all of these reports and their thousands of pages. First, taking another cue from the Adobe Creative Suite, I created icons meant to mimic both the Adobe Creative icons but also the period table. This was something that the stakeholders had wanted from day one, an almost scientifically catalogued approach to software (this is where the DNA strand logos come in). Each icon was created in illustrator manually by me when I would update the reports and the SASS colour file. We would give them an acronym of no more than 3 letters and made sure that they weren’t overlapping with any other directories and made sure it made sense to someone quickly glancing over it.
We then created the Vendor Evaluation Hub, a place where all the directories could live, and by clicking one of the icons you could download the PDF if you are an Info-Tech member. This page still functions today and you can view it at infotech.com/browse/vendors.
During the time I was at Info-Tech we created over 50 different directory reports for software. The creation of these directories is no longer active since I left but still integrates heavily with the Software Reviews part of the company. From July of 2015 till I left I created and updated the page as well as new reports that came in every month. It was easily the largest and most complex project I had ever taken on in my career and was a huge learning and development opportunity for myself.
