Visting Students Alcalde Advertisement

The Project Brief: The brief for this project was to create an engaging magazine advertisement for Alcalde magazine, aimed at promoting UT Austin’s summer online courses for visiting students. The goal was to design an ad that not only captured the essence of summer learning at UT Austin but also emphasized the flexibility and accessibility of these courses, allowing students to study from anywhere.

Notable Issues from the Past:

The Process: The process involved several stages of iteration and feedback. Starting with inspirations and initial design concepts, we explored different themes to capture the summer vibe and UT Austin’s brand. We experimented with various layouts, including simplistic designs with color backgrounds and more complex scenes that transported viewers to ideal study locations. Through collaborative feedback, we refined the ad to include elements like sunglasses and a cold drink to emphasize the leisure aspect of summer learning, alongside academic pursuits.
Significant attention was given to the ad’s textual content, ensuring clarity and engagement. This involved careful placement of the main message, adjusting font sizes for emphasis, and integrating the UT logo to strengthen brand identity. We also optimized the QR code for easy access to more information, ensuring a seamless user experience.

Feedback: Feedback from the team led to further refinements, such as adjusting the call to action and ensuring the UT Austin courses’ value proposition was clear. The final design balanced the ad’s visual and textual elements, resulting in an advertisement that was both aesthetically pleasing and informative. The project was a testament to the power of teamwork, creativity, and attention to detail, culminating in an advertisement that successfully marketed UT Austin’s summer online courses to prospective visiting students.

The Outcome: The outcome was a visually appealing advertisement that effectively communicated the ease and enjoyment of summer learning. Featuring a serene background that suggested a summer setting, the ad combined imagery of a laptop, sunglasses, and a refreshing drink to convey the idea of studying in a relaxed environment. The final design prominently featured the “UT AUSTIN” branding, along with a clear call to action for visiting students, highlighting the affordable course offerings available.

This Month’s Issue Cover + Finished Advertisement

Project: Travel Behavior & Demand Center

Project brief: The project’s brief was to design and develop a new logo and website for the TBD Center at The University of Texas at Austin, focusing on travel behavior and demand, alongside creating a new logo that encapsulates the center’s identity and mission. My goal was to provide a modern, user-friendly website that effectively communicated the center’s research, projects, and findings, along with a logo that was both compact and reflective of the center’s focus on movement and dynamism, as per the client’s preference for incorporating an arrow element similar to that in the CTR logo.

The Process: The process began with a collaborative effort between the design and development teams. My role primarily revolved around curating the website’s design and style, ensuring it aligned with the newly developed logo and the center’s branding requirements. This involved close coordination with the web development team, which focused on the technical aspects, including backend functionalities and ensuring the website’s performance and accessibility.

The Logo: My design process for the logo involved initial research and sketching, discussing different iterations, and making adjustments based on feedback. This iterative process, which included client consultations and refinements, resulted in a logo that was both representative of the TBD Center’s identity and visually aligned with the website’s overall design. The final logo was selected after several rounds of revisions, ensuring it met the client’s vision of being strong, compact, and dynamic, with the inclusion of an arrow within the letters to symbolize movement.

The Outcome: The outcome was a visually cohesive and functional website that not only met but exceeded the client’s expectations. The website, showcased at https://tbd.ctr.utexas.edu, effectively serves as a platform for the TBD Center to highlight its work and engage with its audience. The project was a testament to the power of collaborative teamwork and the importance of a client-centered design approach.

Psychology Lab Template V2

Start: Mar 18th, 2023

To be Completed: N/A

Staff Guidance: Stacy

Client:  All future psychology lab clients

Project Description: While there are requests from the psychology lab to update their current websites, the design team and the web dev want to develop a more efficient workflow to provide several templates for the clients to choose from. The goal of creating the template is to save time in developing “customized” websites for the lab clients. Therefore, the design should be neat to fit the common sections/contents for a research lab as well as easy to develop in WordPress. While I finished my first iteration as a designer in Figma and spent some time on WordPress, we found a long learning curve for designers to implement their designs. Therefore, we held the project for a while and decided to come back to the project during spring break. This week I worked closely with Stacy and learned the platform from him directly by seeing him implement my design in real time.

New Home Page:

By watching how Stacy coded my Figma in WordPress, there are clear weaknesses in the home page version I made before spring break: the lack of consideration of responsiveness and the exclusives on the home page pictures. For UIUX design, we are unsure about how and which devices our users use to open the page. At least, we need to ensure that the page can function well in both monitor view or mobile view. With the totally different dimensions of these devices, the placement of the blockers in my old design makes it hard to deal with the background overlay photos. Specifically, if the lab manager chooses to use the group photo, the mobile view might only have one or two people are gonna showcased on the page. For the second point, since we are building the templates, we have no control over the photo choice and focal point of the photos. If the important content is placed on the right, it might be ignored due to the overlay.

Meanwhile, I changed the header design to make the tabs more inclusive about the amount of texts allowed without balanced negative and positive space.

Old chosen design:

Figma

New Iteration:

Difficulty in implementation

Although the design is revised based on the feedback from Stacy, there are still dilemmas we met during the process. For the header, the platform doesn’t allow us to evenly distributed the sub-menu. Meanwhile, how the photo should perform while the browser is extremely wide?

https://labs.la.utexas.edu/mclab-new/

GSD Course Promo Flyers

Start: Mar 6st, 2024

To be Completed: Mar 8st, 2024

Staff Guidance: De’sha

Client:  UT German Studies Department

Project Description: Germanic Studies has requested the course posters (one portrait for print, one landscape for display) for the class German for Graduate Students in Other Departments. The class is designed to teach graduate students from other departments how to read German for their own research purposes.

Process

Since the focus of the class is to teach graduate students how to read German for their own research purposes, including German characters and syntax, I made two versions based on two directions: One is the chart that includes the basic vowel as the introduction of Germany; the other idea is to include different pieces of historical pieces that might be the first-hand resource that students might consider for their research. However, the vowel chart is sprayed on the manual and makes it less professional. Then second one is a good vibe but is limited to specific information.

Final

For the final version, I decided to change my keyword in search to “German Library” instead of “German Studies” or “Germany”. The scope of the library could convey the sense of researching and studies with broader horizons and possibilities.

STA Presentation

Start: Mar 7st, 2024

To be Completed: Mar 7st 2024

Staff Guidance: De’sha

Client:  Internal LAITS Project

Project Description: Edit Save the Day to match the aesthetic of the presentation poster. Make STA goofy greenscreen cut-out with photos as the add-on element for the presentation poster

Save the Day

Save the Day is the graphic that LAITS sends out STA presentation invitations on social media. Shiya made compelling graphics on the base of wristbands.

In order to make a consistent visual identity, we decided to replace the black background with the elements from the presentation poster. One example Mike gave me was the photo of Polaroid scattered on the table and suggested the overlay of photos. To make the images more vector-based, I chose five different polaroid frame styles and overlaid the STA representative colors to replace the photo inside, emphasizing the text on the wristbands. For the decoration elements, I reused the clips on the presentation poster.

Final Design

STA cutouts

The most significant challenge in the task is to adjust the skin tone under different shadows into the natural one as well as reduce the reflection of green on the light color. I’m able to use the channel filter and eye drop tools to make them works.