STA Blog

Week 3

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Week 3

(9/21)

Boat Recolor

I was asked to recolor a boat.ai and boat.gif for Maddie and Marianne. There were three suggested colors, so I just made 3 versions of the boat (options!).

Recoloring them was pretty simple, and I also learned a bit more about Adobe After Effects in the process. Recoloring in AI was simple, but AE required some more digging, but in the end it came out very clean!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(9/13 – 9/20)

Design Fundamentals: History and Styles

This past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a basic training assignment in my spare time. I learned more about different historical art movements and was tasked with designing a graphic in my preferred movement. I chose Bauhaus because I liked the geometric shapes, and I recognize it from my past Art History courses. I first followed the Youtube tutorial link so that I would know how to create Bauhaus-like shapes and text. Then, I created my own graphic based on what I learned. I made it about the upcoming album release of one of my favorite artists, 5 Seconds of Summer. Although alongside the tutorial-based poster, mine appears more minimal, I think it contains just enough elements to be identifiable as derived from Bauhaus.

 

 

 

Week3

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WEEK 3

Project: STA Design Team Poster

Start: September 13th 2022

To be Completed: September 29th 2022

Staff Guidance: Valerie

The detailed shadowing of the Design STA Team:

  1. We focus on communication. We care about each other and give feedback on others’ works to boost better design.
  2. We are flexible and chill at balancing our time during working. We don’t have to focus on one assignment or training at a scheduled time but organize our time by ourselves.
  3. We have critical eyes and design thinking which vary from each other.
  4. We’re mainly working with computers (plenty of software!)
  5. We collaborate with each other. Design STA has individual projects and group projects. Collaboration enables our STA  to expand their horizons by simply hearing out other people’s ideas. We can discuss our designs in the weekly STA meeting to examine if there is any point we have missed.

Realizing the classical sports world cup design might not fit for the design, I redesigned the trophy in an abstract way. I decided to use geometric figures to represent the sense of designers. I also attached the STA design team logo, LAITS logo and year to ensure the integrality as a final draft in procreate. Here are the final outcomes:

 

Then I started the formal draft in Illustrator. I first used the Mask tool in Photoshop to get Everyone’s portrait.

To make the poster have a more designer vibe, I’d like to emphasize the brush stroke as the background for each Design STA bust.  I found brush stroke png online and photoshop them to paste under each STA.

However, it’s a little bit messy when the colorful bust is attached on a bright yellow so I tried the black&white and add broader, Eventually, to ensure the overall layout looks super clean, I sketched out the white silhouette as the broader for such STA. As I have used the textualized brush stroke as a main object in the center, I decided to make it more vintage and papery style in its background (folded paper) and the (hand-drawing) trophy design. However, I try to figure out if there is anything to include more coding and web elements into the layout. So I might insert the mouse-arrow icon into the poster somewhere.

What I developed in Illustrator for the mouse-arrow icon:

 

 

Project: CTX Refold

Start: September 21th 2022

To be Completed: N/A

Staff Guidance: Maddy, Suloni, and Marianne

On Wednesday, I attended the first meeting of CTX Refold for Dr. Gordo with Maddy, Suloni and Marianne. This is my first time attending the client meeting as a note-taker. It’s a Refine-Web-Design project for Retelling Central Austin History. During the meeting, we summarize several goals such as organizing the content orderly, resetting the color palette, and defining its aesthetic-driven style to appeal to the engaged audience. I’m assigned to create a light mode design fro CTX Retold in Figma. I browsed on Figma Tutorial in KB and started to wireframe the site.

Week 3

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Week 3 (19 – 22)

Training for Web Dev: Git and Github basics

Started on: September 20, 2022
Completed on: September 20, 2022

Description: I learn the basics of using git on terminal line.

I learn to update the git by using git add -u, git commit -m ‘Sample message to commit’. and git push.

Here is the finished product and the second picture shows what is behind the scene.

 

Training for Web Dev: Add Help Docs

Started on: September 20, 2022
Completed on: September 20, 2022

Description: I learn how to add help docs to the Grav so that the new user who also want to edit blog and post it can locate the document to find extra help.

 

Training for Web Dev: WordPress Basic

Started on: September 20, 2022
Completed on: September 20, 2022

Description: I learn the basics of using git on terminal line.

I learn to update the git by using git add -u, git commit -m ‘Sample message to commit’. and git push.

Here is the finished product and the second picture shows what is behind the scene.

Through the trainings, I know how to:

  1. Installing Astra Child Theme
  2. Write and Publish a Page
  3. Write and Publish a Post
  4. Customize the theme
  5. Change Properties in the Global Tab

 

Project: Finding a HTML embeddable Calendar

Started on: September 21, 2022

Completed on: September 21, 2022

Description: For one of the upcoming project, I was tasked with finding a HTML embeddable calendar. I did my research on 9 of them and chose 5 to include on the Google Docs. After diving deeper into the research, I found only 2 that showed their potential: Google Calendar and Tockify.

Requirements: 

  1. Need to be embeddable in HTML
  2. Little to no cost
  3. Beautiful layout
  4. Can customize with some of the elements
  5. Can color code event and add one day or week long events

Challenges: 

I found a couple of embeddable HTML calendars, but it was hard to find one that satisfy or check all the boxes. When we rely on third-party app or service, it seemed harder to customize to our own preference although we do not need to worry about the database or a lot of the behind the scene operation for the app. Therefore, there are some sacrifices when we choose third party app.

Lesson learned: 

While uploading the documents, I choose Google Docs which is not very sustainable in the long run. Therefore, I learned to ask for protocol to follow so that future Web STAs can see, access and learn from my findings.

After asking Marianne for the protocol, she suggests to create a folder in Box and share the link to Box on Basecamp. Lessons learned indeed!

 

Tockify:

Google Calendar:

 

 

Training: Web Dev Basics: How to Use the Browser Inspect Tool

Started on: September 22, 2022

Completed on: September 22, 2022

Description: For this training, I will get to learn about the browser inspect tool of the website. This is extremely useful because it will allow developers to know the HTML elements and CSS styles for the website. If there is anything wrong with the layout, the dev can access the browser inspect tool to examine if any of the elements they did was wrong or not.

TASK:

  1. HTML Modification: Change the banner image of the website of Department of Rhetoric Literature and Writing. The first image is the original photo. The second image is the image I need to change it into. For the third, I found a cool gaming banner so I wonder if that looks good on the website. I think it gives the website futuristic vibe. For the fourth, I want to change into a meme and I chose nyan cat meme and it brings to the website NFT vibe.

     

  2. CSS Modification: Change the color of the pop-up with CSS panel.

 

 

 

 

 

Week 9/13 – 9/19

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Hello! This week for me started off a bit hectic. I began by recoloring some old assets for UTFC. For some reason, a few of the masonry grid backdrops in the recording studio kept appearing blue. Here’s an example of the before:

After changing the color profile and re-editing a plentiful of backdrops, here’s what the recording studio chose:

Along the side, I created a PowerPoint slideshow for UTFC that focused on Ordinal numbers in French. Although I had trouble at the start and started off with a balloon theme, I totally forgot to establish the ordinal number theme. After lots of feedback and helpful suggestions from Yazz & De’sha, I went with a counting-like theme where students get to count the object. I had to hand off the project to someone else but this is how far I got!

For the rest of the week, I received the amazing opportunity to design the STA poster for the Fall 2022 semester. Along with designing a poster according to the theme, I also was able to:

  • Collaborate with jr & sr art directors for approval of the design
  • Shadow and assist jr art director with the direction of team posters & project organization

The theme for this semester revolves around the idea of the Men’s World Cup. From the inspiration pictures I was provided I churned out these various layouts:

Greenscreen Week

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UTFC Greenscreen Slides

The past two weeks have been fairly slow, so I’ve mainly been working through greenscreen slides for UTFC modules. There’s a learning curve to figuring out which images fit best, portraying both the vocabulary noun/verb and the location highlighted in that particular module. Overall, it’s been fun work combing through images of different cities and finding ones that work well.

Module 5.1B – Pronominal Verbs

Module 5.2B – The City (in progress)

 

Planning, Search, and Reasoning Under Uncertainty

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Planning, Search, and Reasoning Under Uncertainty

 

project: Planning, Search, and Reasoning Under Uncertainty
Client /Prof: Joydeep Biswas
completion status: Started September 13th
staff guidance: Maddy
STA team members: N/A
description/plans:

For this part of the project, I was instructed to create the iPad overlay and digital backdrop for this course following the blue template.

To be completed: September 23rd