You are on page 1of 3

Montemayor, Wogou & Lesando 1

Morgan Montemayor, Gabby Wogou & Sophie Lesando

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,

pictures, and videos.

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
Montemayor, Wogou & Lesando 2

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
Montemayor, Wogou & Lesando 3

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.

You might also like