Hello!~

It seems like so long since I’ve worked, thanks to the winter storm last week. Although we were relatively fortunate — never lost power or had any damages, and just lost water for a day — it was a really turbulent time, so it feels nice to be back in relative normalcy and to be back at work.

Since I’ve only worked two days or 9 hours this week, I don’t have a lot to share. However, I wrapped up some IDs and am making significant progress in the shape KB. I’m aiming to have it done for review early next week. Here are a few photo IDs and the link to my shape KB draft. Right now the activity idea is to start with sketching different shapes based on different moods/vibes, and then move on to an introduction of patterns and shapes in AI. The last and biggest deliverable of this KB will be applying the knowledge and skills to a visual & text hierarchy.

Lesson 1 Slideshows

This week, Poonum, Abriella and I finished gathering all assets and creating slideshows for the different eras/movements that we are covering for this lesson. Here are some snapshots of each era that I took care of:

Art Deco

Bauhaus

De Stijl

Info Visualization

Isotype

New Typography

Pop Art

Postmodernism

Swiss Design

We’ve been trying to embed these assets into a slideshow on a KB post but have been having trouble with Google Slides’ iframe format for embedding and the SlideShare plugin link. Hopefully we can figure something out with this!

Here’s how the KB draft for this lesson is looking:

Bezier Curves Activity Documentation

I’ve created a full documentation for the Bezier Curves tutorial I created for the Typography Lesson. Currently, I’m awaiting feedback from Maddy to make any revisions to this. I’m really satisfied with this tutorial, and hopefully, it gives STA’s without experience in AI a good idea of what these concepts are.

PSD Painting Basic Training

I believe this is the last basic training I was assigned to complete for my orientation checklist back in July! While painting with a Wacom tablet can seem a bit challenging at first, it’s really satisfying to see how good painting looks once one gets the hang of it. In this training, I sketched the outlines of a teapot and used the PSD brush and smudge tools to recreate the teapot.

Here are some snapshots of this process:

 

After a couple of weeks of unstable power and wifi, I am happy to be back to sharing my work!

Color Correction Basic Training

This training was incredibly helpful in explaining in detail how the most commonly used adjustments in PSD change an image in a certain way or another. Here are some categories on what was covered in the basic training, with examples being used:

Brightness and Contrast

Levels

Curves

Vibrance

Hue and Saturation

Exposure

Pixel Art

This basic training was simple enough and entertaining to make, starting with choosing a picture to recreate and a limited color palette. Here are some snapshots of this process:

This is a Warhol inspiration, using the Hue slider:

And here are a Muted version, a Preset Color Scheme version, a Global Adjustment version, and a Monochromatic version:

 

Happy Valentine’s!!

This week I worked on Figma, the shapes KB, and a bit on Cascade help.

The shapes KB is going to be part of the eventual design elements KB curriculum, and I’m super excited! I’ve gained a new appreciation for shapes and their place in design. Right now I have most of the research done, have written an introduction and objectives to the training, and begun planning some activities. Next week I hope to polish up the actual writing to a more formal and less stream of consciousness-like tone & format, create some lil pngs of each kind of basic shape, and actually design the activities! I think I have a much clearer idea of where this training should go now. Here is the WIP Google doc!

 

 

http://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2021/02/12/37623-2/

Texas Politics Video Graphics and more

This week, TXP requested I make some graphics in video dimensions for their live-streamed events this week, as well as video end cards. I’ve had Ross Ramsey speak in a couple of my journalism classes, so it’s neat that he’s speaking at TXP as well!

I’ve also been working on the web accessibility UI/UX training this week. I’m just polishing it up on the KB today and hopefully it’ll be completely done by the end of next week! We’re integrating Figma into the training, so I’ve begun my own Figma training — I did the wireframes today.