Social Justice Reflection

   Creating the social justice spread has impacted me greatly, It was an arduous and fun process that allowed me to believe I am making an impact on the world. The issue of homelessness is overlooked and it is always seen on the surface. However no one looks deeper into the situation, what are the actual reasons why these people end up on the street? What can we do to actually and effectively support these people? Coincidentally I had just written a paper on this issue so I already had a decent amount of knowledge and sources to use for my spread. My rough draft had already laid out the fundamentals of my final draft. I had a difficult time choosing appropriate symbols that would work into the design of the spreads. The most universal symbols are pictograms, they're used everywhere and they are easy to understand and think about. I had drawn four  pictograms to use for my design, all of them depicting different aspects of homelessness. Deciding on how many colors to use in my color palette was another obstacle, I already decided on the colors black/dark gray and blue/turquoise but how many shades or others could I add or should I add was the question. In the end I decided to use the primary two I had in my mind. The font decision was an easy task, Proxima nova (personal favorite of mine) and Plantin (another personal favorite). They aren't commonly used and they're a classic font combo, sans serif and serif. I would use Proxima nova (the sans serif font style) for the titles and Plantin (serif font style) for the paragraphs/normal text. Selecting the images was slightly tedious because I had to reselect certain images since they repeated the subject of other identical images or they were misleading. For example the original tiny home image I had was misleading (as Ms. Ibarra brought up) because it seemed like unsheltered residents would have to emigrate to a whole different location, instead being able to stay in the city. Which is why the latest image I used was a youtuber in New York City blogging their experience in a tiny home in the city. The second to last obstacle was designing my data visualization because I did not know how to format it.In the end I stickled to making a 5 borough map with homeless pictograms as measurement units. My data is meant to represent homelessness in the 5 boroughs, my social justice issue focuses on the homelessness crisis in NYC. All that was left was having to organize everything on my spreadsheet and asking for advice from Mr. Hadel and Ms. Ibarra. I had to add more images and reduce the paragraph text. Then I added more vectors to enhance the pages and their meaning. As of writing this reflection, I’ve come to realize that my issue should’ve been broader, discussing global homelessness. Homelessness obviously isn’t limited to just New York City. That would be one thing I would change about my social justice spreadsheets.Other than that I am satisfied with what I have produced. I hope to bring this project out into the real world!