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april projects

May 6, 2025 By Haley Ma

˚✿˖° ⋆ April Projects ⋆˚✿˖°

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LAITS Admin UTDirect Wordmark

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For this project, I was tasked to create section titles for the phrases, “COLA Purchasing” and “COLA Faculty Courseload” to replace where the blue rectangle is hovering over!

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I made some few drafts but was given feedback in setting the ratio of the titles through a max height! Above shows the visual demonstration given by De’sha!

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Finally, I corrected the borders of the titles and it was off to be sent to the client!

E316L Intro to British Literature

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Next I was tasked to recreate canvas homepage and dashboard banners for E316L! I was given instructions to keep a similar color scheme as the buttons and to keep the same images from above!

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For my first draft, I focused too much on creating focus on one particular building, I forgot to inlcude the three others! However, I did like the gradient in the background but it was back to the drawing board!

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Next, I decided to keep the gradient background, but added the rest of the images to the side! Initially, I wanted to keep the color scheme at the forefront but with some feedback from De’sha, we decided to switch it up!

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We decided to make the pictures the forefront and decrease the opacity to make sure the title of the course was still readable! I thought since two of the images were more horizontal I could layer those two on top of each other in the middle and have the more vertical images on the side.

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With some feedback from De’sha, we decided to make all the images into columns and I think it turned out great! I’m still getting the hand of custom canvas layouts but it was fun going back and seeing my process!

Create Your Own 8-Bit Style Animated Gif

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One of the most fun trainings I did this month was create my very own GIF! I based it off my art logo again and wanted to show the switch from happy to sad with the ears and the face! I’m so happy with how it turned out!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

˚✿˖° March Projects ⋆˚✿˖°

April 17, 2025 By Haley Ma

˚✿˖° ⋆ March Projects ⋆˚✿˖°

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E316M (Summer 2025/Barrish)

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For this project I was assigned to recreate a title card, canvas homepage banner, and canvas dashboard graphics for E316M American Literature taught by Dr. Phillip Barrish! As seen above, my job was to replace the Hamilton and Wheatly images and replace it with the Marble image instead! I then created two options, one design following the original format and the other with a faded background!

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With some feedback from De’sha, I created two new designs with one still resembling the original but with more text and the other with an overlay on it!

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I also edited some canvas assets to only include Dr. Phillip Barrish’s name! We decided to go with the design that resembled the original as well! Then it was time to put the editable files into a pptx template that the course can use!

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Basic Training: Logo Design

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I also did some more training by creating a personal logo design in Adobe Photoshop! For this design, I was inspired to create a logo that I could use for stamps and thank you cards when vending my art! I decided with a mascot logo resembling me which suits my brand the most! Although this is just a draft logo, I think it’s a great start to establishing my art brand identity!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

2025 STA Presentation

April 16, 2025 By Nicholas Peasely

2025 STA Presentation


STA Photo Cut Outs

Made photo cut outs for all new STAs! Like myself ฅ^•⩊•^ ฅ


Lower-Thirds Graphic

For this next project I was tasked with designing a Lower Thirds graphic for the STA presentation.

Considerations

⋆。°✩ Keep the design simple and subtle, ensuring it does not distract from the video content.

⋆。°✩ Use LAITS colors or colors from pre-existing graphics for the STA Presentation

⋆。°✩ Find a graphic and font fitting for the theme: Movies, specifically drawing inspo from the The Peanuts Movie poster

Early Versions

After landing on the idea of a film roll, I started mocking up different versions. Playing with:

• Color

• Logo

• Canister Style

• Film Style

After evaluation, we decided to move forward with the last iteration!

Final Version


STA Presentation Webpage

My next project was to design the STA Presentation webpage!

Filed Under: Fall 2024 - Spring 2025, Uncategorized, We are STAs

March and April Update

April 8, 2025 By Thang Truong

STA Presentation Website

Started: 04/04/2024

Description: This website is the website showcasing the livestream for people online to watch!

Thank you to Nicolas for amazing banner.

Web Editor Help

Started: 04/04/2024

Description: This project helps staff at COLA to search easily the right documentation with the use of Retrieval Augmented Generation. Currently, they use Google Dialogue when it only returned one matching result and when adding a new documentation, people need to add a lot of phrases to the document in hope that it can match these phrases with user’s search. Moreover, the model or the techniques they use with Google Dialogue is a black box so it is hard to improve the system. Therefore, I come in to help with upgrading the retrieval part of the system with using Cosine Similarity Search when I converted the documents into vector embedding using Sentence Embedding Model. Then, all of the retrieved relevant documentaries are fed into LLM so that it can generate helpful responses.

All of the functions that wrote:

__construct()

calling_hugging_face($text)

convertHelpCorpusAndStoreToDatabase()

storeEmbeddingIntoDatabase(array $embeddingVector, $path, $title)

processEmbedding(Request $request)

return_best_match_pgvector($embeddingData, $k = 5)

show_validation()

showForm()

The results:

Without intent:
[2025-03-25 21:13:03] Validation Top K: 1, Validation Score: 61, Total: 134 -> 45.5%

[2025-03-25 21:11:49] Validation Top K: 2, Validation Score: 82, Total: 134 -> 61.2%

With intent:
[2025-04-04 19:25:30] Validation Top K: 1, Validation Score: 73, Total: 134 -> 54.5%

[2025-04-04 19:26:44] Validation Top K: 2, Validation Score: 94, Total: 134 -> 70.1%

After eliminating not useful validation entry:

[2025-04-04 19:41:12] Validation Top K: 2, Validation Score: 92, Total: 126 -> 73%

[2025-04-04 19:42:55] Validation Top K: 1, Validation Score: 72, Total: 126 -> 57%

[2025-04-04 19:51:38] Validation Top K: 2, Validation Score: 92, Total: 126
[2025-04-04 19:53:53] Validation Top K: 2, Validation Score: 92, Total: 126

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Texas German Dialect Project Retractable Posters

March 25, 2025 By Kate Shih

TGDP Retractable Posters

I was tasked with continuing to work on the Texas German Dialect Project retractable posters. These posters had already been in the works, and I had to adjust based on client feedback. The client wanted 3 vertical posters with an icon key. Additionally, the client wanted the dates on the timelines to be proportional to the actual time (for example, if the date is labelled “1930-1934”, it should be clearly indicated that the event took place over that span of time).

Here are the posters that I was given to start with:

Changes I had to make:

  • Create icons and develop a visual key
  • Work on making date ranges look like a range on the poster

Creating Icons

This first thing I had to do was develop a visual key. The client wanted icons that represented 5 different types of events: society, immigration, schools, newspapers, and key event. I used Illustrator to draw icons, staying on brand with the colors given to me.

Society
Immigration
Schools
Newspapers
Key Event

Redesigning the Posters

Now that I had icons, I could move on to putting the posters themselves together. The main thing I wanted to focus on was how to show the date range. I settled on added a transparent box behind the event description and using arrows to indicate it’s date range.

After using this technique and adding the icons, the posters ended up looking like this:

Second Drafts

After sending my designs to the client, I got feedback to make sure that the events were proportionally distanced from each other and to add 2 photos + their captions to the poster.

Upon receiving this feedback, I edited Poster 1 to look like this:

With some more tweaking, including changing up the icons a bit, Poster 1 ended up looking like this:

Filed Under: Fall 2024 - Spring 2025, Uncategorized, We are STAs

History SZB Posters

March 25, 2025 By Kate Shih

History SZB Posters

I was assigned to help create posters documenting the life of George I. Sanchez for the SZB building. I was given pictures and text, which I was then to format on posters using Adobe InDesign. The process mainly consisted of cleaning up the photos in Photoshop (sometimes converting to grayscale, removing blemishes, and adjusting them so they weren’t skewed), getting all the elements onto the page, and then rearranging them to make sure that the text was not too overwhelming and that the images were big enough.

Here are some of the posters I’ve worked on:

Filed Under: Fall 2024 - Spring 2025, Uncategorized, We are STAs

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