Project: COLA Website Refresher
Client /Prof: N/A (College of Liberal Arts)
Completion Status: Started August 25, 2021
Staff guidance: Michelle Vanhoose, Chris Rankin
STA team members: Ingrid, Adrian
description/plans: Continue migrating data from the old CMS to the new CMS
To be completed: TBD (long-term)

This past week has mostly just been a mix of Blanton and COLA. I’ve just been migrating more pages for both projects. I’ve uploaded a few pictures of pages from both sites that I have migrated.

 

Project: Blanton Website Migration
Client /Prof: Blanton Museum
Completion Status: Started August 23, 2021
Staff guidance: Ruben Garza
STA team members: Asmita, Marianne, Angie, Abriella
description/plans: Work on migrating the current Blanton museum website pages to the WordPress site
To be completed: TBD (long-term)

LRC Poster, Chatter interviews, KB edits, and more

This past week, I’ve been busy! Here’s a quick synopsis of what I did:

• Talked to Marla and Chris about Chatter
• Edited the photo ID KB article
• Created a new KB article for ID email templates
• Did the animated course graphics training
• Created a draft of a flyer advertising the visiting scholars program at the Linguistics Research Center

Animated course graphics training

I made this intro based on a course I designed a display for. I used brightness and glow effects in AE to simulate lightning, once I separated the foreground cloud and lightning bolts into separate layers in Photoshop.

 

LRC flyer draft

LRC-visitingscholars-poster

The LRC wants to advertise their visitings scholars program, using vague UT branding, an open color scheme, and possibly the banner image from its site. I used the banner image, GT Sectra, and I eyedropped the color scheme from the banner image.

 

 

AFR GRAPHS

 

I worked on 3 graphs in the past two shifts this week. These required a bit of special formatting to make all the information fit. There was no guess work in how to construct the graph since it was a restyling effort. Here are how they ended up looking:

 

ECO304K Stinger Animations

Last week after completing the Ethics and Fairness course graphics. I working on the ECO204K stinger animations. There were three stingers total.

I also added some slight changes to the text animation by adding some easy ease to make the animation smoother.

 

 

 

 

 

I completed the Photo Sourcing and Color Grading training, which taught me how to use gradient maps and color matching to create a coherent aesthetic or style for images. I found this training super fun and easy, and thought I’d share my results below —

For the gradient map part I was asked to choose my favorite film as a starting point. I don’t exactly know if I have a favorite film, to be honest, but Suspiria (1977) is definitely one of my favorites, so I went with it. It’s a stunning movie that I recommend to anyone who hasn’t seen it!

I used the following screencap as a source for colors:

Here were the resultant images:

http://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2021/10/18/suspiria/

Weekly updates

I took Monday off this week for a medical appointment at a weird time. Here’s what I worked on this week and last week! I also was able to schedule a meeting with Marla to discuss Chatter numbers and whatnot for the PR project. I plan on talking with Chris Pittman next, and hopefully Matthew nails down the faculty presentation soon.

Photo ID Guidelines

Ingrid, Angie, Abriella and I have all been working to update the photo ID aesthetic guidelines and training. Last week, we finished the aesthetic edits slide deck, and this week, we chose photos — categorized into easy, medium and hard — for new STAs to practice on. Here are examples:

 

Here are a couple of slides from the slide deck. I actually learned about the selective color tool from Cristina — changed my life. I also tried to emphasize in the slide deck that most photos will need more than one type of edit, and some edits require others after (like cool color balance –> vibrance)

 

 

Color grading training

This was super fun! Thanks to Sheryl for making it! For ~fall vibes~ I chose to match colors to Wes Anderson’s adaptation of “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” incidentally one of my favorite movies.

http://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2021/10/15/41864-2/