The Project:
It started with a 2200-word essay on the barriers women athletic directors face.
It ended with an infographic designed to inform teens and young adults of how few women leaders there are in athletics.
The Transition:
The path to that end was easier than expected. I knew that the purpose of my essay and my infographic would not be the same. My essay thesis simply did not lend itself to a digital and multimodal format.
If you only see my infographic, you would not be able to guess specifically what my thesis was in my essay. To those without the essay in front of them, it would seem to be a simple “call to awareness” as I like to call it. However, my essay actually argued that we need more research on the public effect on women as athletic directors. That is to say, it was a more specific and less publicly relevant topic. So, basically I cut all of the fat and some of the muscle off of the thesis in order to create a message that I felt was best for public consumption.
The first step to eliminating the shortage of women leaders is to draw attention to the issue. If people are not aware of it, the cycle will continue. This is why my infographic is designed to inform. I am taking that first step.
The next step is to inspire young women to pursue careers in sports management. That is the call to action.
I wanted my multimodal assignment to target my peers because we are the ones that can change this. We can inspire and uplift fellow students to be a part of athletic administration. That is how we get more women in leadership positions in athletics.
Considerations:
To address the specifics of the infographic I posit the following topics…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
color: In creating the infographic I felt that black and white did not provide me with enough variety in color. I added olive to the aesthetic as the background and accent color in order to give a calm undertone to the piece.
tone: I considered using backgrounds that mimicked gym floors but when applying them I recognized that it changed the entire tone of the piece. With the floor as a background each segment became playful and it took the attention away from the statistics and therefore the entire argument.
shape: The most difficult part of designing the infographic was getting the shape. It was hard to find the shape of the text that best communicated a specific statement.