COM 301E: Communications Foundations Online

LAITS is producing a foundations course for Moody College, COM 301E. I’ve been put in charge of art direction for the class, including the 20-30 second intro animation.

 

This project is a good learning experience for three reasons:
1) I have little experience in animation and while I’m not the animator, I am planning out the animation and keyframes,
2) I have never been an art director for other STAs like this before, and
3) as a team we will have to be extra considerate about communicating and collaborating during this new work from home COVID-19 situation.

 

The course is an overview of each of the Moody departments, from Speech Pathology to Journalism to Comm and Leadership. I want the intro animation to follow the class outline by featuring a single person processing ideas, to them sharing with a friend, to a group, and eventually communicating through mass media.

 

 

The style will be inspired by this GIF below. The fun colors, cute faces, and organic shapes feel energetic and current, which I know is an important part of Moody’s brand and the communications field in general.

 

Project: COM 301E
Client/Prof: Dr. Madeleine Redlick
Completion status: Planning intro
Staff guidance: Suloni Robertson, Valerie Tran, Quinn Hoinoski
STA team members: Me, TBD
Description/plans: Course development for COM 301E — creation of graphic assets: intro animation and title cards
To be completed: End of summer

Career Services Graphic Refresh

The Liberal Arts Career Services center wanted to update their Graduate student pages with some graphics. Previously the pages were only text, so I broke it up by converting a paragraph into bullet points each with an icon.

 

 

I repeated the icons and added a simple banner on the Welcome page. I designed the icons myself in Illustrator. I used rounded corners and “shiny” marks to make them feel modern and professional.

 

My first animation

I’ve made my first animation in Adobe After Effects! It is a loading animation for the epic simile database that I’m designing the UI/UX for. I chose a boat to represent the ship in Homer’s Odyssey.

 

 

Here is how I envision it in context:

 

Spring 2020 STA Roster

Suloni came back from her trip and suggested that our original roster poster design didn’t reflect the theme of “champions” enough. I agree the theme got lost, so we drafted some new designs that could still use my illustrations.

 

We mixed a lot of our champions inspiration sources in the final design like laurels, film festival awards, and Olympic rings. Mike really liked posters with a “projecting outward” feel so I incorporated that with the outward projection of the colors and portraits. I added shadows to give depth and the feeling of a spotlight. I really like the outcome!

 

Epic Similes UI/UX

I’m starting to design the UI/UX for Dr. Deborah Beck’s online database of epic similes in Greek literature. We met last week with her to see what she wanted from the site.

 

She told us the purpose of the site is when somebody is reading and they see a simile that interests them or is relevant to their research, they could go on the site and search the simile to learn more about it from her classification system. For example, you read “Achilles is like a bird” in the Iliad. You could then go to the site and can search for details about that simile.

 

She also wants users to have a lot of discoverability of the other data; so from a user’s first search they could easily stumble into other similes also in the Iliad, or about Achilles, or birds, etc. The site is mostly for academic use, so users will be scholars and undergrads. She wants the site to feel fun and interactive while you read.

 

Here is its current design. There is lots of extraneous data and unhelpful search options.

 

 

 

Below are some sketches and a rough Adobe XD layout for now. I am waiting for Dr. Beck to sort through what data she needs on the website and send it over, so until then the content on these drafts is TBD. I’m most excited for paring down the search options and improving the UX for each search category.

 

 

 

 

 

Project: Epic Similes Database
Client/Prof: Dr. Deborah Beck
Completion status: beginning
Staff guidance: Suloni Robertson, Valerie Tran, Chris Pittman
STA team members: Me and Jake Engelberg
Description/plans: Create an online database to host Dr. Beck’s research over epic similies in Greek literature.
To be completed: End of summer

STA Roster Poster

Thuy and I are making the STA poster for the semester. The brief is to fit the theme of “champions” and include ~35 headshots and names of each STA. The first thing I thought of for “champions” was designs of vintage Olympic graphics. Thuy was inspired by retro movie poster/ad designs, so because they both draw from a similar time era our ideas have been easy to mesh.

 

Right now I’m illustrating pictures to represent each team (audio, graphics, video, project management) inspired by graphics from the Helsinki Olympics. I’m taking the illustrative feeling and colors from the poster, while adding some more ~retro~ style hashmarks and shading. I’m not a big digital illustrator but it’s fun using the tablet! Thuy is working on the typography and we’ll do formatting together.

 

 

 

Inspiration pic:

 

 

Project: STA Spring 2020 Poster
Client/Prof: LAITS
Completion status: drafting
Staff guidance: Suloni Robertson, Valerie Tran
STA team members: me, Thuy Nguyen
Description/plans: Design a poster to showcase all the STA team’s portraits. Theme is “champions”. The design of this poster will carry into the designs for the spring STA presentation.
To be completed: Feb 11th