Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated

1 The term hat racks is built on an analogy—hats as information and racks as the ways to organize information. Also known as five ways of organizing information.

2 The seminal work on the five hat racks is Information Anxiety by Richard Saul Wurman, Bantam Books, 1990. Note that Wurman changed the hat rack title of continuum to hierarchy in a later edition of the book, which permits the acronym LATCH. The original title continuum is presented here, as the authors believe it to be a more accurate description of the category.