I had a nice break from school and LAITS, I got to see my cat, knit a lot, and visit Enchanted Rock. I’m back and ready to get working again 🙂
We are updating the formatting for an online French course. Mostly we are making sure section headers are accurate and follow the new styling.
We are using very basic CSS to edit each lesson. This standardization will help the students by improving the clarity of the course and making it look more professional.
GRG 301K made me think about switching to a Meteorology major until I found out UT doesn’t offer one. At least I can design posters about meteorology now.
Project: GRG 301K Promotional Flyer
Client/Prof: Department of Geography and the Environment
Completion status: Dec 3rd-10th (complete)
Staff guidance: Suloni Robertson, Valerie Tran
STA team members: Just me
Description/plans: Create a digital signage for GRG 301K course, to be displayed on building monitors
To be completed: ASAP
It turns out the initial screen I was color testing on had a completely different color profile than most other screens in the office – so while my first round of color edits looked ok to me, the photo highlights looked green or red on most other screens.
After talking to some LAITS people who knew more about the screens’ color profiles, I stopped playing with hue/saturation and brightness/contrast settings. The screens don’t get “brighter” per say, because pure white/”brightness” only appears as blue. I used a tan and black gradient map and lowered the green/blue highlights and raised red highlights in curves to achieve this effect. The contrast is also nicer on camera now. Knowing how tricky color balancing a neutral like this is on the screens I’m happy with these results!
The McCombs graphics team sent over assets they’d like to be used for the online courses. My job now is to take their templates and edit them for each class. One major concern is color correcting. LAITS courses are filmed in a studio with a digital monitor backing the professor. While this allows each course to easily look different, filming a digital screen often leads to color issues like in the image below. Understandably McCombs wants to stick to their color palette, so I’ve been working on color correcting the images to come out looking “right” on camera.
This burnt orange and white image looks brown and light blue on camera.
Here are my files:
The color corrected ones look salmon-colored on a computer screen, but as you can see in the images I took from the studio they end up looking tan on camera. I did 5 of these.
Today I tried out some new techniques when it comes to color correcting.
VLabs (Virtual Laboratories of Anthropology online) is due ~the end of November. It’s serious crunch time and there’s a lot left to do. Unfortunately with the tight deadline we have to ditch a lot of stylistic issues and focus on getting everything on the site with accurate info. It was a sad day for the designers.
I’m training Thuy and Abriella how to do Last Looks, which Olivia and I split into 2 rounds: content accuracy and student experience. We picked them because they both have a great eye for detail. After, Olivia and I will do a final sweep and fix all the problems they found in each lab.
Left to do: