Last Day as an STA

Today is my last day as an STA, which is completely surreal! I’ve been an STA at LAITS for most of the last two years (!), and it’s crazy.that it’s coming to an end now. I’m so grateful to have had this job as an undergrad, and to Suloni, Valerie, and Maddy for creating such a supportive and creatively challenging environment, especially during these difficult Covid times. I’ve learned and grown so much over the course of this job, both in terms of improving my technical skills (I can animate things now!) and working collaboratively in groups. I’ve gotten to work on so many interesting projects (studio course graphics, Vlabs, career infographics) which have pushed me but also made me so much more confident as a designer. It’s been an incredible experience just to be around so many talented people and learn from/be inspired by all of y’all, so thank you all so much 🙂

 

via GIPHY

Chatter: Branding/Logo Drafts

🎶 It’s the most wonderful time of the year 🎶 🎄

As someone who hasn’t seen her family for the past eleven months, I am very excited to finally be back home for the holidays and so happy to get more into this season’s spirit. Anyways, enough about me.

 

This activity was a continuation of the past one I blogged about. From the 11 ideas I suggested, I was told that #9 was a clever idea because “campus squirrels + squirrels make chatter sounds = genius”, Thereupon, based on the idea I suggested during my brainstorming to incorporate UT’s squirrels into the new branding, for this task I was instructed to design a draft for the branding/logo for Chatter.

– Just as a general reminder, Chatter is UT’s upcoming replacement for Piazza: “a course-based Q&A discussion board for students, professors, and TAs.”

This takes us to Phase 1: Finding inspiration. At this point I was asked to look for inspiration from preexisting squirrel logos to understand the basics of simplifying a concept into a logo.

 

After that came Phase 2, starting a draft of my own.

 

Draft 1: From one of the inspiration pics that I found, I got the idea to make the squirrel’s tale into a C for Chatter. So I incorporated that into my first draft. However, I got feedback telling me that though funky and cute, the squirrel was a bit too realistic, which is a problem with logos since they’re supposed to be able to be resized without loosing the quality of the shapes. So I was asked to draft a second version with a more geometric and simplified squirrel.

 

Draft 2: And so, this draft was born, where I completely changed the style of the C-tail and made the squirrel mostly out of circles. But the problem with this draft was that the shapes used to build the squirrel were a little too “on-the-nose.” I was given more feedback in a meeting about this, too.

 

After that draft it was decided that the idea to make the squirrel’s tale into a C should be scrapped altogether. But with more clarity, I started working on Draft 3 not long afterwards. At this time though, I was asked to share some ideas for a font to include the wordmark “Chatter” alongside the squirrel. The following were my three suggestion:

 

(They ended up choosing Righteous as the preferred font for this wordmark)

 

Draft 3: For this draft I had a whole new vision and ended up making a squirrel out of four speech bubbles reshaped and resized to fit the proportions of a squirrel. This idea was what worked best! So I got some final feedback to refine this idea and that takes us to draft 4…

 

Draft 4: The final draft! This draft is what got presented to the Chatter team along with 4 more options created by some of my peer STAs.

 

And voilà! Phase 2 was complete…

Study Tips and Wellness Video Project

A lot of things have been happening lately because I have started working on the study tips and wellness video project with Poonum, Angie, and Miguel! We are working in a very close-knit team to design and animate two different videos that will be used as pre-class activities for every class LAITS supports. We will be working on this project throughout winter break. Here is an overview of what has happened thus far.

Storyboarding

After meeting to kick off the project, it was decided that I would start off working mostly on the wellness video. The wellness video gives some guidance on the subject of being well amidst the stressors of life and school. Poonum is the project director/art director of our team, and she went over the script we were given to create a vision for how we wanted to tell the story visually. Initially, we were going to do stick figures, and I took a bit of time to create some storyboards. The first storyboards went through quite a few iterations. Pictured are the initial storyboards I compiled on Photoshop. Since I did not have a tablet, it was pretty tedious because I drew and scanned a bunch of individual pieces and moved them around.

After getting feedback from Valerie and Maddy, we decided to change the direction of the art style. Stick figures (and people figures in general) are kind of difficult to work with, both from a representation perspective but also from an animation perspective. I then tried some more simpler frames with fewer things going on, as seen below, and with a sketched type style.

From here, we met for a longer amount of time with Maddy and Valerie to discuss art direction. We decided to go with plants! Which is very exciting and cute. Under this new direction, Poonum rewrote the vision on how we wanted to tell the story, and I started storyboarding again on pen, paper, Photoshop and InDesign. I still used Photoshop to move around the pieces and form frames in Photoshop, but then I placed them in a storyboard template I made in InDesign.

Asset Creation

Then, we passed the storyboard onto the clients, and they approved the vision we created! So we began the process of planning out how we would be making the actual assets in the video. This required a lot of forward thinking as to how we would be incorporating animation. Everything that needed to be animated would need to be created on its own layer a Photoshop file, so we listed out all the assets that would need to be created to guide the workflow moving forward. That brings me to today, as I was working entirely on asset creation! The tablet I ordered came in today, and thank goodness. Here is a screenshot of me tracing over a plant Angie had created in the storyboarding process. You can see how the layers are versions of the different states of the plant.

Thoughts

This project has been so much fun so far! I really enjoy working in this close-knit team type style and observing how everyone’s individual efforts are piecing together. I’ve learned a lot about illustration, storyboarding, video creation, and project planning. I am very excited to continue working on this project and eventually see the final product. Outside of work, I just finished my last final of the semester yesterday night! Truly, I am so glad to be done. It’s so weird to think that I will soon be in my final semester of undergrad. Here are some songs I have been enjoying lately: painty paint pots and Sirena (idk how to type it). ALSO, Maddy said we might get Mother Earth’s Plantasia-inspired audio from the audio team, which I am so excited for because I love that album. Have a great weekend!

Hi blog it’s been a minute! Work has been great but very very busy. I’m directing two short videos that will be played in all major studio courses with Miguel, Angie, and Athena over winter break. So far, we’ve storyboarded two videos and began on creating assets layers in photoshop. It’s a lot of different working components, but we’re staying as organized as possible!

 

The first video is all about wellness and keeping your body healthy while under pressure. I started off with an idea of using stick figure comics that slide off the screen kind of like a flipbook. After some fine tuning we decided to take a more metaphorical approach and use plants to represent students and diff activities. Here’s a couple slides from our style guide (Athena led the illustrative style for this video)

 

The study tips video focuses more on how to stay focused on school and manage your time wisely. For this video, I decided we’d make a “lofi chillhop beats to study and relax to” but UT themed, mixed with Dora the Explorer’s click and zoom concept for some objects around the room (laptop, whiteboard, etc.) Angie took the artistic direction for this lofi screen, and Miguel is creating the clickable frames.

 

So far super proud of this team for being patient with me as things shift around. They’ve been working so so diligently and I can’t imagine working with anyone else on a project this complex. We’re hoping to get assets finished up by next week before the holidays, which would be the greatest gift I could receive this year tbh :,)