Student Success Tool Logo Update

Welcome back to this journey of designing the logo for the upcoming Student Success Tool that will soon be launched for UT professors to implement in their classes starting this Summer 2021. Last time I posted about this I concluded with a teaser of the theme of this update: shape-based logo drafts. So, after I got that feedback, I started working on the following drafts.

Original Shape-Based Drafts

Note: I started out working with these two because they are the ones with the lower stakes, given that the strongest direction for the logo was decidedly the String Ribbon Reminder route.

Calendar and Target Reminder Drafts

For these I pretty much kept the original idea they were rooted from and got rid of all of the lines. Additionally, I refined the shape of the push pins to be more geometric.

Afterward, Valerie and Bridget (the client) had a chat to settle on one design. Bridget took some of my previous drafts to her project partners to review them. The general consensus pointed towards the finger with the ribbon being the better concept, but that it needs refinements. Furthermore, one concern they had was that though was that if and when the logo got reduced in size it might look like it’s the middle finger, rather than the index. So, to address that, I was tasked to work on the following drafts:

1. A more polished version of the finger logo (and trying to see if tilting it could solve the middle finger issue)

2. A palm-forward version of the finger logo

3. A palm-forward Hook ’em hand with the string

And so, I got to work…

The Failed Shape-Based Batch

I consider these four attempts the failed batch because they steered away from the goal in a major way. But they were born out of a need to try new things. The first two designs with the black background were an attempt at the palm-forward version and the palm-forward Hook ’em hand. I added the black backgrounds to contrast the white hands that would not have been visible with a transparent background over a white page. However, the main problem with those two was that the visual of the hand was not coming through the way it did with the other drafts.

The bottom two drafts were supposed to be a more refined version of the ones above, but they were also not quite as string as they could have been. So, as soon as I came to that conclusion (that Valerie agreed with), I started out on a new batch of drafts.

Afterwards, Valerie suggested a more shape-style approach to reimagining this logo, and that’s what I did for the following designs.

Shape-Style Approach Drafts

About an hour after I posted these I got some more feedback, but I haven’t yet have time to work on it. So, more on this on the next update. Stay tuned!

Lesson 5: Color Update

As promised, here is an update on the Color Theory KB I made out of my part of Lesson 5.

So, contrary to what I originally believed, my part of this lesson would not be part of a single KB with contributions of various STAs. Rather, there are going to be various final KBs for this lesson, and everything I personally worked on would be its own KB. Fun!

Therefore, once I got the chance (considering I was working on other projects at the time that were time sensitive), I started working on transferring all of the info I collected/wrote and the tutorials I repurposed and designed into a KB post. This process took about two hours to complete including the reformatting of images and text because frankly this tutorial is quite long.

Additionally, in one of our daily meetings, I got really insightful feedback from a fellow STA saying that I should probably change the name of the KB from the original “Moods and Meanings of Color” to something psychology related. So I changed the name to “Color Theory, History, and Psychology.” So I did, but after long consideration and further working on the banner, the official name for the KB just became “Color Theory.”

Finally, I started working on a banner. I skimmed trough many of the other lessons and tutorials we have in our STA database to find inspiration and I was truly mesmerized by the beautiful banner my peer STAs have created throughout the years. The stakes were high. Thereupon, I searched for some inspiration of images related to color, the history of color, color wheels and color schemes. I finally settled on a concept for the banner: the color prism, because not only is this topic directly related to the history of color theory, but it fits the aesthetic and purpose of this tutorial as well. I made a bunch of different drafts for the banner. Some were scrapped because the title was too long, so I changed it. Some were then scrapped to make room for new ideas, like changing the perspective and positioning of the prism to the center. At this point I got a lot of great feedback from Suloni herself, and the “peanut gallery.” which I assume were Valerie and Maddy. All in all, it was all really helpful to finish this task.

This is what the final version of the banner ended up looking like:

Fun fact, when I uploaded the final banner into the KB I had some trouble trying to figure out why it was shifted to the right, but Maddy suggested I ask Abriella, so I did. After I got feedback from her, we were able to figure out the problem was just an easily fixable issue with the Left-center-right align of the image. A few moments later, boom! I published the KB…

At last, here is the link to the KB tutorial: http://sites.la.utexas.edu/kb/2021/04/08/5-color-color-theory/ Feel free to check it out!

More IFML Animations!

IFML has requested more animations along with the original bumper. The following are website icons that will loop across the live page.

Bumper Animation

Webpage Icons

GIF

Hello bl˚g this week I’ve been working on designing a title slide for a powerpoint template that will be used for RHE 309K, Rhetoric of Resistance. I started with an idea of using different sized speech bubbles, based off this image, to demonstrate the idea of rhetoric:

I started off with a color scheme that included the colors below, but Valerie brought up that dark colors can weigh down design:

From here, Sheryl created a template that mimicked UT’s secondary palette, and I made two versions of the title slide based off of this, one with her palette and one using UT’s palette. In the second, I added in some off-center black outlines to add more depth to the graphic (was also playing around with fonts at this stage lol)

From here, Valerie asked me to make a version with two stacked speech bubbles in the bottom right corner to place the course title and instructor’s name. My most recent draft, which I’ll need to tweak a bit next week:

Cascade Training Part 1

After finishing up most of the HealthyHorns Sleep Assessment, I had some downtime, so I started on my Cascade training. Here’s part 1 finished!

WP Clone Testing, Case Page Layout Design Guide

Hi! These are some of the tasks I spent the last week working on.

WP Clone Testing

Sheryl and I spent some time assisting Ruben with a WordPress task. Here is the request.

Would you guys be able to help me out with a wordpress task? I am creating a workflow to move WP sites off our servers and into Docker. This should make them more secure. I have a site http://notevenpast.development.la.utexas.edu/ that is a clone of https://notevenpast.org/ – I need some STA(s) to look at the sites and compare them to see if they function identically from a user perspective and also for an editor.

Ruben just needed a second/third pair of eyes to go through a clone he made of the notevenpast.org website. We spent some time comparing the clone and the original site from a user’s perspective by clicking on links and testing functionalities, such as the ability to subscribe to a the page’s newsletter through the clone. We then did the same thing, but from an author’s perspective. Some of the functionalities we tested out were making pages, posts, and publishing. There were some little things that we found, but for the most part it was all good! I hope it helped Ruben.

Case Page Layout Design Guide

We are looking to have an instruction guide on the COLA page that will inform our users of different stylistic features they can employ to make their sites more visually enhanced.

Abriella walked me through a task (the brief is above). Based on a practice page Abriella set up, I spent some time taking screenshots and writing some instructions on the options available to users when editing their Cascade pages. These instructions give a little bit of guidance on dimensions, organizational tips, and color variety. I’ve included some of the screenshots as an example, and the topics covered encompassed:

• Banner (dimensions included)
• Photos (minimum dimensions and DPIs)
• Colored bars on the right side of the page.
• Various ways to embed a video (box, youtube, right side, in body text)
• Fonts Headings and Text Wrapping
• Pullquotes
• URL linked images
• Page breaks

I also spent some time writing up a project summary for the religiology logo that I worked on last semester. What a throwback!

Outside of being an STA, I have just been doing my school work and occasionally going outside. I’ve also been trying to journal a little bit more because I find it entertaining to read back on old thoughts and write on paper. However, I am finding it difficult to read my handwriting. ALSO I watched two episodes Mononoke…… it’s pretty creepy but it’s so nice to look at. I’ve been thinking, and I think my newfound interest in anime was birthed out of a need for escapism as a result of the pandemic.