STA Blog

The Past Week!

By

The Past Week!

Hello, I don’t really have too many visual things to show, but over the last week, I have mostly been continuing with the KBs and starting to put them onto the actual KB WordPress.

Here is the banner that I fixed in the earlier portions of the week.

I was added to the Cascade help ticket request team, so I read over a lot of the guides and best practices. I can see that a lot of people are requesting; however, I am still unsure of my responsibilities here haha.

This week, I also started working on the PSD Flashcards KB and began working with Poonum, Ingrid, and De’Sha on an assignment to transfer over a few PowerPoints over to a new standardized format that Poonum designed.

This week my computer screen went kaput, and I thought I was gonna lose it, but then it miraculously came back so….. hopefully it doesn’t keep doing this to me.

Hope everyone has a good and relaxing spring break!

By

It’s spring break (!) almost. Hope everyone gets some much needed rest this upcoming week.

Anyway, this past week I’ve been working on a mixture of things. I only worked 9 hours, but on Wednesday I worked with De’sha on a new Cascade site set-up request and followed up with client communication.

I also began working on converting some PSY 319K ppts to a new format. In between these various projects I’ve also been working a bit on a banner for the shape KB.

 

http://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2021/03/12/miscellany/

Typography training

By

Typography Activity

This week, I wrote up an activity for part three of our new training curriculum: typography in action. In the training, the STA takes a blank letter-sized INDD file, 12 pt Arial text, and makes into a logical hierarchy and eye-catching design — using only type. Fun, right? I’ll post it to the KB next week.

I’ve also started sifting through a hefty Box folder of photos with Miguel and Cristina! It’s tedious, but there’s some great photography in there.

More ISPRII, Design Today, AE Training, and Texas Global

By

After Effects Training Planning

This week, I started working with Angie on planning new After Effects activities. My section is composed of creating a quick 5-second animation of a logo using masks, the pen tool, and imported assets from PSD or AI. As an example, I’ve been animating this logo:

I made a short story-board (which would be part of the training) showing how the logo would be animated:

Here’s a quick clip of what I have animated so far (frames 1 and 2):

 

ISPRII

After some feedback from our client, I created new alternatives using different Serif fonts for the ISPRII logo:

 

Design Today Slideshow

The Design Today section for the Design History lesson is basically complete!

Lesson 5: Color

By

Lesson 5: Color

The purpose of this project is to make a whole new lesson and tutorial specifically on color for future STAs to use as reference and learn when they get to work on these projects. As you can see, this is the lesson 5 out of 9 or 10 that will be part of the new STA curriculum.

 

This specific lesson on color is divided into three content sections: Moods and Meanings of Color, Color as Emphasis, and Color + Type: An Advanced Hierarchy Training. I was in charged of working on the Moods and Meanings of Color section. So I got down to business. I divided this section into three main topics and two activities. The order of which I defined as follows:

 

  1. Color Theory (which included…)
    • Primary / Secondary / Tertiary Colors
    • More Important Vocabulary
      • Including: hue / tint / tone / shade
    • Color Wheels
      • Including the RYB / additive / subtractive color wheels
  2. Activity #1: Creating your Color Wheel
    • Which was an activity previously created by another STA for the current Color Wheel training that I supplemented in order to replace it…
  3. The Meaning of Color
    • Where I went into the meanings and values that are usually associated with each color, like so:
  4. Color Schemes (which included…)
    • Monochromatic / Analogous / Complementary / Triadic / Tetradic Color Schemes
    • And examples on how these color schemes can be optimized by changing the saturation of the palettes to different hues, tints, tones and shades.
  5. Activity #2: Choosing Colors and Making a Color Scheme
    • Where STAs will have to create a color scheme for each of the three situations I listed in the activity by recalling what they learned in this section of the lesson.

Other than that, I also worked on this lesson by writing down a small introduction for it. Oh, and I also wrote the section on Background info that I called History of Color which describes a brief history of Color and Color Theory from Aristotle’s to modern times.

 

This is still a work in progress, since there are two other sections of the lesson that my peer STAs for this project are working on, but I will make sure to update you when the KB is done and uploaded and, of course, I’ll link it.