STA Blog

Design History KB

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Design History KB

To help out with KB I have been overseeing what Miguel and Poonum are putting together for their slides for review and also making suggestions to add, switch, and remove artists and designers to the KB. Maddy suggested some more graphic artists rather than just famous artists for post-modern, so I picked a few to swap out to make it more relevant to what we do here at the office.

Then to help move things along I also made the graphics for the KB such as the banner and an overview timeline. Which one we will use and edits on the design of them are still pending though.

 

Some Updates after the Snow Storm

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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:

Back to Schubert . . .

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Back to Schubert . . .

I had a Schubert phase last year where I’d listen to a lot of his compositions. I also learned his Impromptu Op. 142 No. 2. I sort of got out of that phase for a while until recently when I encountered his collection of the later Impromptus (which are not as well-known as Op. 142 and Op. 90). These are his Klavierstücke D.946. They’re pretty Schubertian (triplets, beautiful melodies, repeated left hand chords), but still there exist moments of (in the words of Ashish Xiangyi Kumar, the YouTube channel I visited quite a bit) “nervous quality.” Nevertheless, I find them quite charming and addictive (I’ve been looping through them too many times these past few days). I hope you enjoy :).

P.S.: my favorite passage is from the second piece, C section, from 20:58 – 26:33. I personally think that these cascading melodies are so beautiful, haunting, and passionate. Pianist Avdeeva’s performance is also very intimate and sweet.

Exploring WP Theming and Customization

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Exploring WP Theming and Customization

In prepping for a potentially new project for me, I’ve been playing around with WP theming on a sandbox site that Relena gave me access to. I changed the theme / background, reformatted some pages to get myself used to the block-formatting, and also located where I can add customize CSS and all other customizations.

Ethics Blog Cascade Help Request

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Ethics Blog Cascade Help Request

I’ve been working with Cristina on the Ethics Blog Cascade Help Request. The client wanted some organizations / layout formatting for their Ethics Blog site, so I’ve tested out a couple of things.

First, the Teaching Resources page is currently a page with many hyperlinks linking to the articles, which looks like this:

The client wanted something like this:

I was able to replicate this using CSS Flexbox in Cascade, but we’re most likely not going with this option because Tim advised us to go with something that will be maintainable for the client.

Cristina had been working on another solution using tables and the WYSIWYG editor, which is more preferable.

Second, the client wanted to reformat their Blog page to a layout similar to the News page. However, they wanted to be able to use the News functionality through the Web Editor as well. So I’ve constructed a similar layout for their Blog page using just the WYSIWYG editor.

I think we’ve made good progress, and we’ll be ready to show the client soon!