Arabic Program Infographic

Addressing the challenge of creating awareness and understanding of Qatar Foundation International’s (QFI) work in the Americas and of its Arabic language and Arab culture program to a largely unfamiliar Western audience, I endeavored to create an infographic that highlighted the Foundations impact, the breadth of its work, and the needs it addressed through its programs. Illustrating and combining QFI’s key performance data and some results from its national survey of Arabic language programs across the US, my creative approach was to utilize letters from the Arabic alphabet as charts and graph measures for them. I chose Arabic letters with either angular or circular forms that lend themselves naturally to represent bar and pie charts and carried that visual concept throughout the infographic. The biggest challenge came from the overwhelming amount of information and program data that could be presented. I tackled this by distilling and prioritizing the information that best showed the direct impact on communities and individuals and established QFI’s thought-leadership in the Arabic education field. To convey the range of areas the Foundation supported, I categorized the data into four main sections: Reach of QFI’s Arabic school programs; survey results that demonstrated the needs and challenges facing Arabic programs; a breakdown of the number of beneficiaries from the various initiatives and grants; and finally the performance numbers from QFI’s open-education-resources and digital tools. The resulting infographic was released digitally to coincide with the UN's annual World Arabic Language Day on December 18 and distributed as a poster to promote QFI’s work during conferences and exhibits.