Retractable Banners

All the design STAs were asked to submit banner designs that could potentially be used as a backdrop for online classes this fall. We used official UT photography and branding/colors in our designs.

The first ones I submitted on Monday were a bit too saturated and distracting, plus the photo of the UT tower that I used was not placed that well–it would’ve been covered up by the professor standing in the middle of the frame most of the time. So I made some edits and tried out some different layouts based on the feedback I got from Suloni and Valerie, and I think they came out much better! Suloni liked the neutral/off-white version because it’s less distracting and doesn’t compete with anything

 

1st Round of Drafts:

 

 

 

 

2nd Round of Drafts:

For these I just took the opacity down slightly on the orange/off-white/blue overlays (about 90%) and I added an adjustment layer on top to desaturate them a bit more. The photos are also at about 40% opacity so they fade into the background more.

 

 

 

 

This is roughly what the banner will look like while the professor is teaching:

 

ARH303 Canvas Homepage Banner

Dr. Ann Johns requested a new homepage banner to use when she teaches ARH303 online this summer (I think it’s starting in a few weeks).

She has an existing banner that she uses for ARH301, and she just wanted a few images swapped out to use in the 303 class. She sent me links to the images she uses on her tests, and I mocked up a few different options for her to pick from:

Photo IDs

LAITS Podcasts

We got another project this week to update a dozen or so LAITS podcasts. We each got assigned a podcast to update in WordPress by adding bios and pictures for the guest speakers (which we find online), plus transcriptions for all the episodes. We’re getting the transcriptions through UT Libraries’ automatic transcription service, which has been working pretty well. The transcriptions are going a little slower than I expected because you can only get 10 at a time, and I have 30+ episodes to get through. But other than that I haven’t had any issues!

Knowledge Base

The final step in updating the Knowledge Base is reorganizing the black menu bar at the top of the site. There are several broken links, and several links that are probably outdated, so I’m looking at ways to update and relabel the categories with Abriella and Maddy. Orientation is coming up soon, so it will be nice to have the KB updated for the new STAs, especially while we’re all working from home.

Other than that, I don’t have much else to share. I think I have a project coming up for an art history class, so more to share soon!

Basic Trainings

I finally finished the image tracing tutorial! It is published to the KB now. It needed a lot of updates and new screenshots, which took awhile, but I think it’s a lot more comprehensive now. When I was rewriting this basic training, I was trying to organize the steps better and give more context for each step because I think it helps people learn and remember things better (it helps me at least). I also tried to make it more visually interesting and fun.

 

The process for redoing a basic training training is basically 1) Make a draft with an original banner and, if necessary, updated screenshots, 2) Get feedback from the lead STA on Basecamp (Abriella’s is the lead in this case–she’s overseeing all the basic trainings), 3) Make edits and publish the draft, then if we can, 4) Get feedback from somebody who’s actually doing the training.

 

Today I’m going to be adding a few more tips to the gif basic training because another STA (Jake) was going through it and found some features that I missed which are helpful for animating in Photoshop. I also have a 3rd basic training that’s going to be based on a tutorial that Suloni found online, which I’m going to start working on soon. It looks really fun so I’m excited about starting that.

 

KB Table of Contents

Abriella, Maddy and I are also still in the process of revamping the Knowledge Base site. We want the basic trainings to be featured better on the site so they’re easy for new STAs to find, plus we cleared out a lot of outdated posts that were adding clutter to the site.
Here is what the old table of contents looked like. Also, it’s not shown in this screenshot, but the categories in the right sidebar used to be twice as long (we removed a lot of the unnecessary ones)

And here’s the current (but still work-in-progress) table of contents. It is the new landing page of the site. Abriella made the banner, I made the headers and tags, which we may or may not keep in the final design. I thought the tags would be the easiest way to label basic trainings, because you can just copy and paste the tag into the table of contents and the actual post. It’s maybe not the most efficient tagging system, but the WordPress theme this site uses is pretty limited, so there aren’t a lot of options available.

Here’s what the basic trainings could potentially look like if we add the tags to the top of each post:

Wrapping Up LRC

The clients requested three final mockups (below) last Thursday showing different functionality/views of the site to potentially use in their grant proposal. I haven’t heard back from them yet, so I’m not completely sure what the status of this project is, but it’s basically winding down.

In my remaining time (I was given 12 hours for this project) I’ll probably put the assets for the interactive all together in a folder in Box so they can be used in the future.

Knowledge Base

This past week I’ve been focusing on updates to the Knowledge Base. We’re reorganizing the site to have more of a focus on basic trainings, plus we’re updating the actual basic trainings to make sure they’re current.

I recently finished the basic training on how to make a gif in Photoshop, which is here: http://sites.la.utexas.edu/kb/2020/02/04/create-your-own-animated-gif/

I’m also working on redoing the live tracing tutorial. The original training is pretty outdated because the tool has more features in newer versions of illustrator (it’s also not called live tracing anymore; it’s called image tracing).

Here is the original live tracing tutorial: http://sites.la.utexas.edu/kb/2014/01/13/illustrator-livetracing-tutorials/

Here is the updated image tracing tutorial I’m working on: http://sites.la.utexas.edu/kb/2020/06/10/image-tracing-in-illustrator/

KB Table of Contents

 

KB basic training

I made some updates to a basic training page in the LAITS Knowledge Base. The page is “Create Your Own Animated Gif,” and I basically just created a banner to go at the top of the page and added an introduction. I still might add a few things to the instructions to clarify some things or add more information, but I think the tutorial is overall more fleshed out than it used to be. Abriella is leading the project to update and add new basic trainings, so I’m posting on Basecamp to get approval from her on my edits.

Yesterday Suloni talked about featuring the basic trainings more prominently on the KB site, so I think we’re going to start making some changes to make that happen.

Here’s the page I’m talking about: http://sites.la.utexas.edu/kb/2020/02/04/create-your-own-animated-gif/

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More changes to the LRC mockup

The LRC clients sent me more text to add to the static mockup and had some translation corrections. They also requested I make a few more aesthetic changes. The main thing was they wanted the glyphs (the little bubble areas) to become a darker shade of green when they are selected (instead of a lighter shade like before). These will hopefully be the final images that they can use when they submit their grant proposal, unless there are more changes that need to be made.

The clients don’t seem very concerned about getting the actual interactive done, they mainly just need the static image ready to showcase. So I’m waiting to hear back if they want me to start creating the Canvasser interactive or not.