I decided to use my blog topic as inspiration for the infographic that I created for this project. As a runner on the UMW track team, I am racing at various track meets every weekend with a goal of decreasing my time in my events as the season progresses. I wanted to create a graphic that would display the trend that my running events are following, while also expressing just how much running I am doing all together in this year's spring track season.
Although I haven't raced the same events at every meet, and although there are still some meets left to go, I wanted to display the times I have run so far by charting them on a line graph. For this I used Microsoft Excel, where I entered my times into the cells and then created a graph from there. I did it for the two main events that I run: the 800m and the 1600m. There is one hiccup in choosing to chart the 1600m - I will not be running the 1600m for the rest of the season, because once indoor track switches to outdoor track, we run the 1500m. I have yet to run this event though, so I chose to stick with the mile times I have run while also including the Nationals qualifying time for the 1500m next to it (I did the same with the 800m). I am hoping that my piece conveys how as the season goes on, my times will continue to decrease. The gold stars denoting the qualifying times for Nationals should also show what my goal is for my times. The colors I chose for these graphs are basic (red and blue) but also school colors - UMW is red, navy, and white.
The other means of conveying information in my piece comes from the shoe prints that are stamped along the border. Each shoe print is meant to be about 55 miles of running, which adds up to about 660 miles of running in five months. This is approximately the mileage I will have completed at the end of May (about 33 miles per week). Although it is not exact, it is interesting to see that 660 miles would get you to Augusta, ME from Fredericksburg, VA. I included images of these two states because I thought it expressed just how much distance that 660 miles is.
The coloring in my piece is very basic, though I did play with the school colors where I have blue highlighting certain aspects. I included a sketch of a flower next to the title "Spring Track 2011" because I wanted to play off of the information being conveyed. I also included my blog url in the graphic because it is directly related to my topic.
