STA Blog

Summer 2025

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Summer 2025

This summer, I went home (California) and got the chance to work for local government. I helped them add new sections to their website, as well as created some marketing materials!

Check out what I did below:

I added a new section to their website catered towards the older population. This included revamping their 50+ Program’s web presence, as well has adding a resource hub.

Visit the live site here: https://www.losaltosca.gov/660/Aging-Adult-Resources

I also got the chance to do a bunch of graphic design work:

Aside from my local government work, I also did some work for LAITS, pursued some side projects, hiked by the ocean, and ate a lot of ice cream (dairy free, of course).

I also made a cat friend ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ

Texas German Phonology (TGDP)

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Texas German Phonology Poster (TGDP)

This banner is part of TGDP’s “linguistics of Texas German” mini-series. I was given the information and photos that go on the poster, as well as a couple of reference posters.

Here was the first draft of the poster:

Project status: Waiting for feedback

June 9 – 13

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New stingers!

We are at the end goal for the GOV310L stingers and this time, I had to mkae 2 that could have their titles edited for differing topics. Here’s how they came out!

I had a ton of fun with these and I even got to make a template for the video team to switch the bottom text title out. Hopefully the template I made is easy to adapt to. Overall, these stingers have been super fun to work on!

Roster Poster updates

We have new themes to work on! I was suggested to think of the themes Winter Olympics 2026 and Americana Art. I decided to get started on the olympics theme first. The first peice of advice I was given is that since we have 3 different types of posters to make, I should consider how to separate the theme into different aspects for example not just the sports but also the ceremony, the winter, the athletes, etc.

Here’s what I’ve mocked up so far.

2025 STA Presentation

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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!

March and April Update

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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

The Rise and Fall of German in Texas Posters (TGDP)

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The Rise and Fall of German in Texas Posters (TGDP)

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 photos + captions to the poster.

Project status: Waiting for feedback