COM 301E: Communications Foundations Online

LAITS is producing a foundations course for Moody College, COM 301E. I’ve been put in charge of art direction for the class, including the 20-30 second intro animation.

 

This project is a good learning experience for three reasons:
1) I have little experience in animation and while I’m not the animator, I am planning out the animation and keyframes,
2) I have never been an art director for other STAs like this before, and
3) as a team we will have to be extra considerate about communicating and collaborating during this new work from home COVID-19 situation.

 

The course is an overview of each of the Moody departments, from Speech Pathology to Journalism to Comm and Leadership. I want the intro animation to follow the class outline by featuring a single person processing ideas, to them sharing with a friend, to a group, and eventually communicating through mass media.

 

 

The style will be inspired by this GIF below. The fun colors, cute faces, and organic shapes feel energetic and current, which I know is an important part of Moody’s brand and the communications field in general.

 

Project: COM 301E
Client/Prof: Dr. Madeleine Redlick
Completion status: Planning intro
Staff guidance: Suloni Robertson, Valerie Tran, Quinn Hoinoski
STA team members: Me, TBD
Description/plans: Course development for COM 301E — creation of graphic assets: intro animation and title cards
To be completed: End of summer

Career Services Graphic Refresh

The Liberal Arts Career Services center wanted to update their Graduate student pages with some graphics. Previously the pages were only text, so I broke it up by converting a paragraph into bullet points each with an icon.

 

 

I repeated the icons and added a simple banner on the Welcome page. I designed the icons myself in Illustrator. I used rounded corners and “shiny” marks to make them feel modern and professional.

 

I worked on the Cascade test site and created a table using the HTML editor in my test site

 

I created a page with custom layout with buttons and an icon. I worked on creating a pullQuote styling using CSS.

 

I had a client meeting to discuss the layout of the Warfield faculty book webpage layout and started working on creating a document to help the client maintain the table layout in the faculty book web page.

My first animation

I’ve made my first animation in Adobe After Effects! It is a loading animation for the epic simile database that I’m designing the UI/UX for. I chose a boat to represent the ship in Homer’s Odyssey.

 

 

Here is how I envision it in context:

 

Spring 2020 STA Roster

Suloni came back from her trip and suggested that our original roster poster design didn’t reflect the theme of “champions” enough. I agree the theme got lost, so we drafted some new designs that could still use my illustrations.

 

We mixed a lot of our champions inspiration sources in the final design like laurels, film festival awards, and Olympic rings. Mike really liked posters with a “projecting outward” feel so I incorporated that with the outward projection of the colors and portraits. I added shadows to give depth and the feeling of a spotlight. I really like the outcome!