Okay, this was something I should have updated on here last week, but forgot. And I only worked 1 day since our last meeting, so…
Maddy asked me to replace the sky on this photo of Kigali.
I wondered how to do this for a bit, but it turns out photoshop has a “replace sky” tool. Turned out nice!
Here is Leilani in front of it:
🙂
This was the main thing I worked on after finishing the biostats logo. I had a list of edits and a suggested layout from the clients, but had trouble making it fit exactly right… the end result was 3 alternative layouts. One closer to the original, one with a larger map, and one with 2 columns. Waiting to hear back which is preferred.
Project:Â Bio 311D backdrops
Client /Prof:Â (?)
completion status: Done
staff guidance:Â Maddy K
STA team members: Adrian
description/plans: Unit backdrops for Bio
To be completed:Â Friday 5/26
This was a fun one! While it may have been mostly photo sourcing, it required some bio research (yay!). For making 3 backdrops for different units of a bio course, the professor provided some guidance in the form of example clipart. Also, Maddy provided a nice template she used to make unit 4 (ecology) already.
The first unit was genetics and micro-evolution, which entails individual speciation, heredity, and cell biology. The provided pictures were this:
Final backdrop (a mixture of pictures from stock sites and wikimedia) ended up like this:
The second unit was macroevolution, a little more abstract. The only example graphics were a few phylogeny trees.
The topic itself includes larger evolutionary changes such as evolution of new organs, mass extinctions, adaptive radiation such as the Cambrian explosion, and horizontal gene transfer. I took some liberties and included more paleontological stuff to make it more visually interesting.
Final unit was physiology, the most straightforward.
I found some nice Unsplash photos of plastic organ models, which are more interesting than flat diagrams/clipart and less grisly than real anatomy photos. Perfect.
Mostly just worked on this this week! One thing I did was make the vector logo an actual transparent vector. The old version had a lot of opaque fills for the overlapping sections. 
It took some creative use of the pathfinder tool to slice it up the right way.
Unfortunately the end result isn’t that impressive at a glance because the goal was to make it visually identical to the old version, but trust me that it took a lot of work.
Also, the animation. This went through a lot of iterations, most of which I didn’t export, but here’s the final (?) one.
So shortly after last week’s meeting, Leilani and I drafted several more ideas. Drawing logos in sharpie is very fun.
This was the suite we sent to the clients:
Who liked 1 and 3 the most. So I started drafting 1. It started off a little skinny…
Maddy suggested thickening the dna strands. It was still not very well standardized though.
I ended up redoing all of it on a precise 50 x 50 grid.
Here’s how it looks in white!
Currently working on animation, which will be… interesting!
Mostly more of the same here, image tracking and sourcing. No original graphics to share this week. Just a lot of trial and error reverse searching.
Thanks to Maddy for helping draft this one. Unlike last time, we actually had trouble filling the space!
I experimenting with upsizing and posterizing a very artifacty map. Maddy helped by physically printing it at 300 dpi to see how it really looked (original above).
While it’s slightly grainy at the larger scale, it’s still no less readable than the original, and viewers will likely be at a distance anyways.
Project: edX MSDS: Biostats v1
Client /Prof: MSDS (?)
completion status:Â WIP
staff guidance:Â Maddy K
STA team members: Leilani
description/plans:Â TBA
To be completed:Â Mid-May
First completely new project in a while, I haven’t written one of those headers in ages. I overheard Maddy discussing a request to design a biostatistics logo and asked about helping. So far, just drafted logos. It seems like Leilani had some of the same ideas via convergent evolution, like the DNA graph.
I think this might be the main thing I worked on all week. Of course, there was a lot of the photo sourcing spreadsheets that were featured on other people’s blogs. But I got to do something else this week – photo editing.
So, calendars… that’s something that’s hard to come by on stock photo sites. Or at least, most of them look like this:
Not the most readable example for a vocab lesson. The old lesson used screenshots of proprietary calendar softwares, so my job was to make replacements. I started with these 3 photos.
They had a few issues still. The English labeling, mostly, the lack of Saturdays for one, and the branch blocking the other.
For some variants, I actually had to edit the days of the month.
The year calendar was the easiest edit, just using clone stamp. The month names were already in boxes in the PPT file, and the weekday abbreviations from Spanish are the same as French.
This one wasn’t for a specific date, and could have been any calendar photo, but I liked it enough to edit in the proper names and a whole new column from scratch.
Remember the Beirut slides? I might have covered them on here. Well, a lot came from Wikimedia and need to be replaced. About half. Exactly 12/25 actually, which I know because I made a new tracking sheet just for these city image slides:
It looks like someone’s already added their own tabs to it.