Infographic analysis: the rise in homelessness in New York City
Rafiq Alim
ENG 202 202A
Professor Pamela Stemberg
When choosing a topic that should be brought to the people’s awareness, one of those topics is that homelessness that is taking place all over the nation, especially cities like New York City. Homelessness is one of the biggest problems in the nation, in the world, people under various reasons had to live on the streets without any form of comfort and/or safety. I felt this was a topic that needed to be brought because the high number of homeless people were concerning. When choosing how to put this into an infographic, had to think what the best way is to express this topic.
For the infographic I choose this to be organized as an informational/educational kind of infographic. When I choose to do the topic about homelessness, I wanted to have the info out and clear about the causes, where said causes came from, what they resulted in, an informative kind of pattern would be the best way to get the point. There were other patterns I could’ve tried out like a timeline for example, but I find them harder to work with me than the informational pattern. Plus mapping out homelessness was hard as there’s no fully accurate number of how many there are, there were times when cities stopped counting, and there wasn’t an exact date of when the rise started, so displaying the causes and effects seemed like the best option.
The main audience that I’m trying to reach out is the people of New York City but wanted also the people around the United States to notice the infographic as the homeless problem was not only in New York but also many other cities in the United States. New York is basically one of the prime places where there is a high number of homeless people. Many of the reason why there is a high number of homelessness is due to the environmental struggles that the state presents, so addressing this state and getting the word out to its people seem like a good idea.
I used graphics that give a clear visual of idea of what I was expressing. In the case that what I wrote down was confusing and/or unclear I choose graphics that would support what I wrote, give the audience an idea of what I’m talking about. A few of the images I used were of what homelessness looks like, images that assist the causes that resulted in homelessness, pretty much the graphics are to give clarity to the readers.
When choosing how I wanted my infographic to be displayed I wanted it too just be simple and clear. I wasn’t trying to make it fancy just wanted to express the topic and the seriousness of it. When choosing the background color, I felt a dark gray color would be fitting towards homelessness, it’s a depressing topic and dark gray seem like the right color to represent it. The infographic needed to give people a reality check, most people downgrade the level of how bad homelessness is, the dark gray color can assist in how terrible it is to not have a home. Each graphic I had body text next to it so one can assist the other in expressing the problem. There were some issues when constructing the infographic that I had to change.
Originally, I was planning to base my infographic on another’s infographic, but most I found I had trouble finding how to change it to how I wanted so I decided to make my own. At first the background was light blue, there wasn’t any specific reason for, then I relied on that it wouldn’t be the right color for my topic, and it led to dark gray for reason already said in previous paragraph. The images were somewhat easy to choose from, it just where to put them that was difficult. Decided that each page hade its own way of arranging graphics, some were sided with text, some under text, they all are with text to give visuals. Was at first planning to have it all on one page but that became too crowded so adding more pages with each having their own use was a good idea, helped drive my point.
My hope is that the audience learned more about homelessness and the seriousness behind it. I hope the takeaway of this for the readers is they’ll put more into fixing the issue. People would come together to help homeless people find homes, bring up their lives, find ways to prevent more people from being coming homeless. If people/communities stand together and make plan with themselves to fight this then this problem start to dissipate until it’s gone.
