STA Blog

My STA Bio

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My STA Bio

I finished my bio today! It shows off some of my interests: games, coffee, and my cat, Dirty Brown Sugar Milk Tea with Tapioca (or Tappy)! The games listed below are my current favorites, Genshin Impact, Super Smash Bros, and Beat Saber.

 

TXP

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TXP Event Graphics – Event 1: TLIS

TLIS — The Legislative Internship Seminar — educates new legislative staff and interns on the inner workings of the Capitol and how to talk to me, the news media (lol I’m taking a reporting state gov class right now). The Texas Politics Project organizes the multi-day event in conjunction with Moody’s Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life.

Online and Studio Course Graphics Training

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Online and Studio Course Graphics Training

This past week, I finished the rest of the the Style A and B trainings for the Online course graphics trainings. Poonum gave me good advice about waiting for feedback before continuing on to sections like the Design Menu, as it would become very tedious to make all the edits and export again if changes needed to be made. So now, I should be prepared to make course graphics packages if needed.

I also started working on the Studio Course Graphics training, which is for courses taught in the LAITS studio. Since I kind of made a course graphic for the earth class so I could do the After Effects training, I decided to do this training for the Art3800 mock-course. The design brief is as follows:

Professor Request
“Please look at what artists and pieces are in my updated syllabus to draw inspiration for your design. I don’t specialize graphic design personally, however I do think you may be able to draw inspiration from the Bauhaus artists of the 1920’s and 30’s. I also take my students to tour the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum each semester, which may bring you inspiration as well. Thank you…”
So, I started planning out some directions for how I wanted to take the graphic, and I came up with two ideas listed here. I ultimately went with idea one because I had a clearer idea in my head on how to execute it, because it incorporated more of the professor’s requests, and because it involved colors that would be more likely to appear true to color on the studio monitors. Since the studio can warp the appearance of color, there are a few shades that are known to work better in the studio like sepia, cool tones, and jewel tones. We were told to avoid bright colors and pure black and white, so the second idea I had wouldn’t work too well.
Here is where I started making the graphic. I used a lot of different textures, noise, and blending modes to achieve the appearance it has. I tried to make it bauhaus-y because the professor mentioned that, but I’m not sure if this is actually bauhaus-y. I took the colors from a picture I found of the museum that the professor was talking about. You can see a test I did with the placement of the graphics and how it would look if professors were sitting in front of it. Currently, I am playing around with incorporating artwork as a textural element, to further tie the graphic back to the class. Still working on this training just wanted to write a blog post since I forgot to last Friday.
Still watching Naruto! Here are two songs that I like right now. One and Two. Have a great week!

More Training Assignments 

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More Training Assignments

Incoming work has been pretty low recently so I’ve been knocking out the last of my training assignments in the meantime 🙂 Here is a highlight of all that I’ve learned for Adobe Illustrator. I’ve also recently updated the STA Banner to reflect the current staff (welcome Relena) for the spring semester!

 

AI Pixel Art

                                                   

AI Live Trace

 

AI Shape Manipulation

Color Wheel

STA Banner

Basic Trainings

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AI Logo Basic Training

I enjoyed this training very much because I got to play around with designing a logo based on my initials. It was really nice to see how many variations and concepts come up with only two letters. Here’s a couple of iterations I made while looking into my logo:

I ended up choosing the fourth design, which is symmetrical and forms an ambigram. Here are are some variations in color based on this logo:

I ended up choosing the duo-toned blue logo since it emphasizes the duality of the orientation of the logo. Here are some mockups of different merch items the logo could be on:

Finally, here’s a version of my logo including my full name:

 

Color Wheel Basic Training

I really enjoyed learning a bit about color theory and the additive/subtractive aspects of color. Here are some progress snapshots of the design I went with for my color wheel:

Course Graphics Basic Training

I just started this training. So far, I’ve come up with a few different mood boards for the style of the course: Earth’s Dynamic Environment II.

These are the three mood boards I’ve come up with:

Moodboard 1:

  • Earthy tones with satellite images of landscapes
  • Font: Noto Serif

Moodboard 2:

  • Cool tones with images of different stages of water
  • Font: Rubik

Moodboard 3:

  • Green tones with images of green mountainscapes
  • Font: Alegreya

And here are some digital backdrops I’ve come up with based on these mood boards and feedback from Maddy:

TXP

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More Texas Politics!

I got my TXP social graphic templates approved yesterday, almost right on time! There’s still a lot of work to do for Texas Politics, but I’m looking forward to it. I’m taking a class on reporting on the state government (I’m writing a story on HB 160 as I write), so this project has been a lot of fun for me.