Sunday, January 27, 2013

W4: Infographic Storyboard


Title: Critical Languages of the Central Asian Region

Purpose / Goal: To educate and inform
This infographic will focus on educating and providing information about the critical languages (as deemed by the US Department of Education) in Central Asia. It’s main purpose will be to act as a marketing tool for a center whose mission is to disseminate information about Central Asian languages. The audience of the information are people who are unfamiliar with the languages of the region.

Narrative Description of Content and Design:


The infographic will be based on a 11"x17" poster size and will be divided into 4 sections:
Languages spoken in Central Asia by country and population of speakers of languages by country
Overall population of speakers of each language
Types of writing systems used for each language (Arabic script, Cyrillic, Latin, other, etc)
The numbers of American universities that offer classes in each language

To gather this data, I will use the U.S. Department of Education’s List of Critical languages, census reports for the CA countries, and online resources through various university language programs.

The first part, Languages spoken in Central Asia by country, will be represented using a map of Central Asia and a bubble graph will be used to express the population of speakers of the language by country.

The Overall population of speakers of each language will be depicted using bar graphs showing the comparison of populations. (I haven't decided yet if I will split the information into three charts: one for Turkic based languages, one for Persian based languages, and other...I think I'll wait until I start putting the charts together to see how easy it is to read the information.)

For the Types of writing systems, I was planning on doing some kind of Venn Diagram since many of the languages overlap writing systems that they use.

I'm not quite sure how I'm going to show the universities that offer classes. I'm imagining a comparison chart of some kind using glyphs, but I still have to work this out.

The overall design for the poster will use Central Asian colors: like beige, orange, golden, red, etc. and the background/borders will use Central Asian patterns like often seen in tapestries and rugs. For the titles and subtitles, I will use a font called Psuedo Saudi that looks like Arabic script.



2 comments:

  1. Amber, Although I really like that font, I might caution against using it,except for decorations. It's really difficult to read.

    Perhaps the larger the camel, the more universities offer those specific courses.

    I'm interested to the the Types of Writing styles, since I'm not sure exactly what that category means.

    ~Dr. L

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dr. L, I was only planning on using the font for titles, not for the smaller stuff. Maybe if it is too hard to read, I can include a "translation" underneath in smaller print.

    The types of writing systems will be Arabic script, Latin script (like English uses), or Cyrillic script. I might possibly need an "other category" for some runic scripts, but I think most of the languages all use one of those three (A, L, C) now, even if historically they used something else. And for this inforgraphic, I'm only looking at the script they use today, not what they've used in the past.

    ReplyDelete