Boxing Number System

tl;dr
Learning experience strategy: multimodal, scaffolded learning through hearing , seeing, and doing. 
Visual design strategy: 'slick' like a boxer, clean and minimalist.

Sound design strategy: 90's boom-bap rap that 'gets you in the zone'.​​
 

1. Learning experience - I wanted to offer new boxers a quick guide to the 'Boxing Number System' that was more interactive than watching a YouTube video or reading a blog, yet delivered in an efficient and structured way: under 10 minutes and accessible to anyone to follow along.  Memorization is motivated by repetition and testing, both of which I sought to incorporate.  Moreover, since this is geared towards optimizing a physical exercise, I wanted the learner to also incorporate their body.   As the Chinese proverb goes, "Hear and I forget. I see and I remember. Do and I understand.”  While audio-visual information helps in memorization, doing is the best form of learning.  As such, a scaffolded approach was used where each learning element builds-off the other culminating into a final test, to produce a fully immersive learning experience.  Thus, the learning strategies I sought to utilize were:
   
   i) multimodal learning - where a textual overview of the Boxing Number System was supplemented by music which served to orient the mood of the learner, and videos to demonstrate how the punches are thrown.  
   ii) scaffolded learning - where a high-level overview of the system would be presented, then broken down into ‘mini-lessons’, and followed finally by a testing phase where the learner would demonstrate their knowledge.  
   iii) learning through doing - where the learner would be prompted to follow along with videos, calling out punch numbers as they mimicked the boxer's movements, connecting theory with practice.   
    

2. Visual Design - Boxing represents to me ‘slick’ and economical movements; striking with great power and impact at the most opportune moments.  As such, I wanted the overall visual representation of the learning experience to reflect a minimalist layout, meaning clean lines and good use of negative space accompanied by stark images/videos/text that 'hits hard' when it needs to.  The colour palette I chose matched the Hayabusa boxing gloves I wore in the videos which were prominently white, with black, grey, and red detailing.  As such, my primary background was white, fonts and buttons black, and red/grey for secondary button functions.  The logo appearing throughout was inspired by old school boxing gym logos like Toronto’s Sully’s Boxing.  The font, League Spartan, was chosen as much for its warrior association as its clean, bold, and modern look.  The videos were shot on an iPhone 13 pro at a local GoodLife gym where I wanted ‘the boxer’ (c’est moi) to punch into the camera, showing clearly how the punch is thrown, but moreover to show the power of each strike, allowing the learner to feel the weight of the strikes.  
    

3. Sound Design - Possibly due to my age, I associate boxing gyms with 90s hip-hop music so I wanted to compose a short looping 'boom-bap' track to play in the background.  It needed to be mid-tempo (85bpm-ish), not too distracting (i.e. not over produced with tons of timbres), yet had to have a ‘pump you up’ and ‘get you in the zone’ vibe to it, making you feel like you were in the gym training.  Something like the Rocky soundtrack meets J Dilla.  When I started playing around in Ableton, I had these J Dilla drum samples that I programmed to sound like the intro to Mobb Deep’s 'Shook Ones, Pt. II'.  Then I added some chords off a Juno synth and some organ stabs, and that was that: simple yet catchy.  For accessibility purposes, if the learner is distracted by the music I included an option to mute the sound.