Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Professor Whitaker
English 1030
21 April 2019
Design Choices
We examined many different aspects of Clemson when trying to narrow down a topic for
our multimodal project. We were fascinated by Holtzendorff Hall and how it used to be the
YMCA for Clemson and the rest of our ideas grew from there. Ultimately we chose to do our
project centered around Holtzendorff Hall, mainly how it used to be the YMCA but is now an
academic building, its namesake, and Y beach which was established by the YMCA. This topic
allowed for many subtopics beneath it to be included in our project. We each were drawn
towards different aspects of the project so it was easy to divide up the work. We first thought
about doing our project on Y beach itself but while researching it further, found more
information available for the YMCA and this led us to our decision.
After we decided to broaden our topic to the YMCA as a whole, we realized that there
were a handful of different aspects to talk about. All those smaller parts were what led us to
choosing a website over the other mediums. With a website we can easily divide our information
up into related topics and separate them into their own pages, allowing our audience to pick and
choose what information they wanted to view. By using a website for our multimodal argument
we were able to incorporate a variety of creative mediums into one cohesive unit, like text,
Sophie has created a website before, so she spearheaded most of the design decisions
since she was already familiar with what details look best when put on a webpage in terms of
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font, color, and organizing all of the information. Morgan found most of our information about
Mr. Holtzendorf through news articles in the archives so she assembled his portion of our
website. She found articles that detailed his involvement in the YMCA and why the building is
called Holtzendorff Hall. Sophie frequents Y Beach and is part of sorority here on campus.
Through her sorority she heard that Greek Life used to host events on Y Beach and she decided
to do the Y Beach portion of our website on old events that used to be hosted there when it was
under the control of the YMCA. Gabby has class twice a week in Holtzendorff hall and was most
familiar with its transition from YMCA to academic building since saw reminisce of it on a daily
basis. She decided to focus her section on what Holtzendorff Hall used to contain when it was
the YMCA and how it went from being that to where she currently has biology lecture.
In our website we have a few newspaper clippings for our readers to look at. Using these
made our lives much easier. Not only were they a great source of information, they also provided
us with images of Holtzendorff that we couldn’t find online. Since many of them came from The
Tiger they were simple to site and we already had the rights to use them. In regards to our
audience, we thought the news articles would catch their eye. First hand records are interesting to
look at when you’re researching the history of campus because, along with being full of
information, they also provide you with the emotions of the time. They take you back to that
moment of history and are more intimate than us just summarizing them for our audience.
When it comes to pictures, we decided to take our own and mix those in with ones we
found online. We had to Google a few of the older images we couldn’t find in the archives -
many of those being of Holtzendorff Hall. The pictures we took ourselves include those of Y
Beach and the Modern shots of Holtzendorff Hall. We took our own because this way we knew
we would have the rights to use them on a live website, but also because they gave us a chance to
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be a little more creative. The pictures we took of Holtzendorff Hall were intentionally taken at
the same angles as the older images we got off line. This lets our audience see a clear before and
after shot.