Women's safety in the gym is a conversation I've had many times throughout and before my college career. The one that sparked this project, however, happened during a women's lifting club meeting. Hearing the stories other women had about their experiences in the gym raised a very important question for me: how often do things like this happen? Later that year, I would take my Design Research class, and Empower Her was born. Although it started as an Instagram prototype, it was revamped into a web infographic. The goal of Empower Her was to create a format that could be reached by anyone, anywhere, so women and femme presenting people would know that they are not alone, and masc presenting people could hear real stories from real people.
Originally, Empower Her was created as an Instagram account prototype. The goal of the project, from the Instagram account to the infographic, was to design something that could reach wider audiences. To send Empower Her out into the world, I decided to make the project web-based no matter how I redesigned it. I started the updated design by choosing a format that would allow me to space out the writing better, and focused a lot more on illustrative elements to make the piece more visually interesting.
My Instagram prototype focused primarily on typography, because I had to fit so much information into such small squares. The information and research was the most important thing to focus on, so my visual language was primary colors, circles, and line art. This was also my first experience working with data visualization, and I learned a lot from this project. The most important lesson I learned: be cognizant of how much space you have, and keep Instagram designs simple and smaller.
