Hello bl˚g this week I’ve been working on designing a title slide for a powerpoint template that will be used for RHE 309K, Rhetoric of Resistance. I started with an idea of using different sized speech bubbles, based off this image, to demonstrate the idea of rhetoric:

I started off with a color scheme that included the colors below, but Valerie brought up that dark colors can weigh down design:

From here, Sheryl created a template that mimicked UT’s secondary palette, and I made two versions of the title slide based off of this, one with her palette and one using UT’s palette. In the second, I added in some off-center black outlines to add more depth to the graphic (was also playing around with fonts at this stage lol)

From here, Valerie asked me to make a version with two stacked speech bubbles in the bottom right corner to place the course title and instructor’s name. My most recent draft, which I’ll need to tweak a bit next week:

Hiiii bl∆g last week Maddy and I met with Marla and Heather to see if there was any work they’d like us to prioritize that they’re unable to manage. Heather told me that Ruben has been working on debugging a new video manager where professor’s lectures are uploaded, clipped, and captioned. She said she’d like for me to become familiar with the tool, and afterwards, I would help in documenting where people’s test-runs go wrong so that Ruben can fix things. The idea here is to have a middle man between the testers and Ruben so that debugging is more efficient.

So…began running through the testing instructions step-by-step yesterday afternoon. The “test” is to see if you can take an entire lecture, chop it into 5 pieces, and then render each video. These steps aren’t super clear, so it took me a bit to find the right buttons. I’m still not entirely sure I ran through these steps correctly, because my first render created a job with 27 separate tasks, and failed on the 4th of those 27. I’m pretty sure I’m only supposed to have 5 tasks, one for each clip that I’m creating. Furthermore, after attempting to re-render, The failed file blocked the new one from beginning to render, so that job just read “queued”.

I spoke to Ruben about this, at which point he deleted both jobs and asked me to try again…this job is still stuck in “queued”. Notice how below, the job numbers jump from 103 to 106. That is because Ruben deleted my first two failed jobs:

 

Ruben has told me that the site is busted. Needless to say I’m impressed with myself 🙂 Hoping that things will be fixed soon. Regardless of this, I think some things should be changed on the documentation explaining how to test the video manager, so I will see if I can improve upon that in the mean time.

Hello blôg I’ve been assigning course graphics to some STAs and giving feedback on those, it’s going pretty well so far! I’ve made this spreadsheet to keep track of things:

Right now there have only been 4 requests, but Maddy told me there are about 15 courses to be updated, so things will probably pick up soon.

 

I also met with Marla and Heather, Director and Assistant Director of Course Development (I think) to discuss how I can help them in their roles. I’ve been tasked with learning more about the video manager where lectures are uploaded and edited. LAITS is trying to switch to a new video manager, but there are some bugs, so I’m going to work on finding these bugs and making some documentation for fixing them (with the help of people who actually fully understand the video manager lol). Exciting stuff! Lots of meetings lately! See ya next week!

Been working on reformatting some powerpoints for Texas Global Innovations Labs. Here are some of my favorite transformations!

The original slide had a mixture of images and clip art, along with a list of trade secrets:

I found some icons from The Noun Project, placed a color overlay on them in photoshop, and BOOM:

For this slide, the map and pins seemed super outdated. I found a map icon and pin icon on the noun project, then placed the original photo in the background on photoshop to ensure the new pins matched up. After I aligned the pins, I removed the image from the background, and BAM:

The original slide wanted to indicate that hearing aids, visual aids, and any third sense will grab 90% of a person’s attention. It also wanted to indicate how the senses attracted attention, with visual and auditory holding more weight over the rest.

 

I decided to split this slide into two, beginning with the percentages of information retention, then with the senses (it took Valerie and I a bit to get this first one adjusted correctly lol):

I just submit the last powerpoint for revision, which concludes my second powerpoint project! These are pretty fun, but some times the original slides have so many layers on top of each other that parsing through the content becomes a bit tedious. I definitely enjoy the template-making / reviewing process a bit more, but y’all know I love my repetitive tasks <3

Hello blôg the past two weeks I’ve been working on reformatting some powerpoints for PSY319K. Below are the templates I created:

This project’s timeline shifted pretty rapidly, as the professor uploaded the powerpoints right before Spring Break and wanted to record three lectures a day throughout that week. We used a spreadsheet to keep things on task:

Each powerpoint was uploaded into a folder for review, at which point I checked that the powerpoint content and animations matched the original uploads. Then, those powerpoints were uploaded into a final review folder for the professor to access. Here’s what some of those slides looked like:

This assignment was pretty fun to manage! I really enjoy being on the editor side of review processes. I also learned how to make master slides in powerpoint which is super useful when you’re assigning reformatting out to people on different shifts; the better your template, the fewer errors you will have!

Good afternoon blôg! It’s been a minute, getting trickier to find time to update this. Last week I finished up the PSD Cutout training that Megan created. The idea was to use a mask to boost the contrast of the image so that the cutout portion could be easily selected. This went fine for the easy and medium versions:

The “hard” image was much more difficult because there were some white flowers that needed to be saved. Initially, when I did this cutout I made the contrast so high that the flowers were lost. After a bit of adjusting I was able to save *most* of the flowers:

 

Pretty tricky stuff. Using the polygon lasso tool to get some of the bits of background in between flower buds helped!