Week XL

Another slow week, assorted small tasks.

STA Bio

I don’t have much to say on this, a self-explanatory fun assignment, but I guess this cements the fact that a grainy noise texture is one of my trademarks now. It just makes everything feel so much more earthy and retro! Like it’s flickering on a vintage monitor or printed on a cheap zine.

HIS 315L – The United States Since 1865

Just a simple text update again, though I spent most of it on a scavenger hunt for the editables. Turns out they were embedded in the Basecamp comments, not any of the Box links also found in the Basecamp comments. Another reminder to please keep your files organized!

Health Transformation Research Institute Statistical Literacy – RAZ

We’re still in the pregame phase, but we’re doing some planning for the powerpoints and some assigned reading:

https://www.brightcarbon.com/blog/presentation-design-principles-better-powerpoint-design/

Notes from the discussion:

• The ways to break up bullet points into grids and dividing lines were most interesting. However, I feel like it will be hard to predict what we can do for RAZ until we know the exact volume and consistency of the slide content.
• Consistency has been an issue in the past – I’ve sunk lots of time into adapting a powerpoint format for one unique slide after another.

And some of Rachel’s:

• Depending on the kind of content Raz wants, we will probably need a style guide. If we make assets in illustrator, we can make a style guide like we did for AFR.
• A lot of clients tend to send a lot of text and want us to fit them into the slide. I’m not sure if this will be the case, but there’s been some issues where the amount of text for a specific slide doesn’t go well with the general powerpoint format. I think flexibility to divide things up into more slides may help with this
• A powerpoint template for various different slides should also probably save a lot of time, but once again sometimes it can still be tedious if specific slides don’t fit the template
• Images are sometimes sent that are not the same aspect ratio but need to be on the same slide – depending on this particular content, we can probably find a work around or ask for a replacement

Intermediate Training: Brochures

So long, InDesign! I’m back to Illustrator for this one. The training itself is very straightforward, with few hints as to the anatomy of a brochure, so I started simple.

However, I found myself wondering what the heck does go on the back of a brochure, and in reading some google results, I decided to try and copy a sleeker format found in one example.

I’m sticking to the futura, and faded palette, but I’m not entirely sure how to balance everything visually. This one will take a lot of fiddling, but it’s a skill I need to get better at.

Week XXXIX

Texas German Dialect Project

Not finalized yet – but getting closer! This time the edits only took about an hour.

ECO 304L Introduction to Macroeconomics

Just another professor name edit. This one had some confusion because I was accidentally directed to the wrong course initially, which was missing some editables, so I spent a while on forensic reconstruction before realizing the mix-up.

Course Design Menu Compendium

This one was fun – Suloni asked for course graphic design menus for a few of our flashier courses, which fortunately I had already made. Except, they weren’t very compact, so I consolidated them into a smaller format (the originals had huge empty spaces where the clients hadn’t requested certain graphics from the template).

Basic Training: Research for Meaningful Brand System

Finally, after several weeks and about 6x the suggested total hours, I’ve done everything I possibly can with my ‘downtime’ training, constructing my own brandbook.

Copying some questions I answered on Basecamp:

• As ornate as parts of might look, I was even more over-ambitious at the start haha. It was a good lesson in streamlining. The wordmark logo is a good example of that. I wanted to make something as snazzy as I could with as few actual moving parts to rearrange as possible.

  Plus, public domain old art is a really good resource! Credit to Wenceslaus Hollar.

• The main technical thing I learned was that image trace is MUCH more economical than a manual pen tool for making vectors in organic shapes. I still have a lot to learn with vectors.
• This was one of the most fun trainings, just open ended enough to allow a lot of creativity but focused enough that I could compare mine to other STAs for reference. I took much longer than prescribed but I made good use of the time.

Week XXXVII

Texas German Dialect Project

Newest draft!

Maddy had suggested scooting the captions into the right column, so the images have much more breathing room now. The images are tweaked to be consistently sized, which means the spacing is slightly inconsistent – it’s an endless battle but sometimes you gotta compromise!

CoLA Web Refresh Support Documentation

I am guilty of getting through these very slowly… A lot of the work is scratching my chin and guessing how to reorganize messy pages like this that were auto-migrated from Cascade.

That’s not too new for me, but it turns out Cascade can’t be accessed anymore! Rest in peace old buddy o7

Since I can’t access the older versions of the sites, progress is a little slow deciphering what order the screenshots were originally in, and between which steps, but I don’t mind some slow work this summer.

Health Transformation Research Institute Statistical Literacy – RAZ

Project: Health Transformation Research Institute Statistical Literacy
Client /Prof: Rebecca A Zarate
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Maddy K, Suloni robertson
STA team members: N/A
description/plans: TBA
To be completed: TBA

Still in the very early stages, but eventually I will be designing a powerpoint for this course. Whether adapting slide content from scripts or reformatting premade slide content is still up in the air. I attended a client meeting to take notes (a first!) but so far, nothing visual to show.

UTFC graphics

More of the same, but I’m learning a lot about Francophile geography and places that look like Wes Anderson stills!

 

Week XXXVII

I have 3 tasks this week, in descending priority from 1-3

Texas German Dialect Project

Finally got some client feedback, and spent a whole day grappling with the difficulty of sizing and spacing elements consistently in InDesign. My first attempt had all the images at a consistent size that worked for the smallest text boxes, but left a lot of awkward space.

After that, I decided to line image up with the top and bottom of each text box, making them vary with the length of each text (which is still eyeballed, since the box size is adjusted manually, but the spacing between boxes is automated).

The result is sort of better, except that first thing next week, I need to almost all of it to adjust for a header mistake, and split step 8 into a header and subheaders, as well as maybe making the titles and image captions separate text boxes, so I can readjust the image sizes to the top margins of the header text boxes and the bottom of the caption text boxes, and then reset the image border width to 2 since that changes upon resize, and then fine tune the alignment again since changing the border width alters that. Whew!

Priority level: 1

Basic Training: Research for Meaningful Brand System

As mentioned, I’ve been taking my time with this, and making the graphics as fancy as possible. The booklet is heavily derived from a 17th century Bohemian woodcut; I used content-aware fill to make a blank version of the paper background for some pages and kept a low-opacity version of the illustration for others.

I estimate it’ll be done the next full shift I work on it.

Priority level: 3

CoLA Web Refresh Support Documentation

Another small task I picked up, this took longer than expected, because I am writing the documentation from scratch, and am quite rusty on a lot of Refresh features. I have only written up 1 page so far.

I will be doing more testing/research and writing more next week.

Priority level: 2

Week XXXVI

Texas German Dialect Project

My (final) first draft of this scrapped the vertical guides and evenly spaced everything. As of writing, I am still waiting for client feedback.

Basic Training: Research for Meaningful Brand Systems

This is an older training I’d finished the first part of months ago. The second part involves making a brand booklet for a fictional cafe with the following info:

• Name: Fairy Forest Cafe
• Mission Statement: Our mission is to inspire wonder and magic in the day-to-day. We are a 24-hour cafe welcome to all those who wish to enjoy a warm beverage, mingle, study, read, or just sit and enjoy the ambiance.
• 3-5 Adjectives: whimsical, natural, cozy, fresh, relaxed
• Messaging: Magical
• Audience: in an urban environment, typically serves students and young twenty/thirty somethings who are looking to get a good read on, do work, and perhaps mingle with fellow coffee goers in a casual manner. These twenty to thirty somethings love organization, “quirky” things, and consuming caffeinated products.
• Type of Restaurant: coffee, desserts, refreshments, and some light food (think sandwiches and soups). Like halfway between Bennu and this cafe (El Bosc de les Fades)

The booklet itself is to include a moodboard, logo, color scheme, typography guide, and merchandise.

I started with the logo, to work outwards from its colors/design elements. I’ve been taking my time with this training, since it’s been a slow week, and it’s a good opportunity to self-teach Illustrator and Indesign; I need a lot of refreshing for both. I wanted to incorporate moth/butterfly wings into the logo, so my first idea was to try tracing a photo as a raster, then vectorizing it.

 

…I wasn’t very satisfied with my mouse drawing, so I tried tracing vector shapes directly over an illustration.

…and was even less satisfied. (The image is a public domain woodcut from Wikimedia). 

I tried directly vectorizing it next and actually made it work pretty well, so I used that for this logo with a mint-chocolate palette.

The colors were sampled from some of my moodboard pictures, old growth forest photos and John Bauer paintings.

I’ve started drafting the actual stylebook, but it’s pretty plain so far. I plan to look at some references on Behance, and rework some things like the typography and my old InDesign nemesis, guidelines.

Chemistry Readiness Course

This was a quick exercise in independent problem-solving: a somewhat ambiguous design task assigned minutes before the managers left for a 1 hour break, and 1 hour before my shift ended, due by the day’s end. The source photo was low res, so I made several blurred versions blown up to the right proportions for a studio backdrop, and since I couldn’t upload into the requested Volume server, I left the editables in an accessible Box drive.

CE 333T Engineering Communication

Another quick design task, this one was just updating the professor for 2 Canvas graphics, and it came with its own moral too – always save your editables! After some sleuthing I deduced I would have to remake them from scratch. Thankfully that doesn’t take long for Style A graphics.

Week XXXV

Scheduling has been weird but finals are done – sorry about the inconsistency!

I’ve noticed that mentally organizing these and going through my old basecamp posts to collect the screenshots and remember everything I’ve done takes much longer than actually writing them. Perhaps I should start saving bullet point notes and screenshots into a folder as I go through projects to make blog updates more streamlined.

CoLA Web Refresh

This last stretch was a lot of smaller sites. I felt really smart organizing my unit notes spreadsheet into alternating colors blocks for each department, until I realized just today that someone had made tabs for the different departments at the bottom. Isn’t the human brain amazing!

As much of a pain as it was for me to update 20+ years of newsletter archives for some dusty old sites, I’m glad they’re accessible; someday I’d like to go through and read them just for curiosity’s sake.

Japan Lab

With a few variations in color and file format, these are the final logos.

Nice and simple, even though my pixel fujisama was sadly unused, this was a fun project and it’s the first time seeing a logo I designed on a website.

Texas German Dialect Project

Project: Retractable Banner for “The TGDP Process”
Client /Prof: TGDP (Margaret Blevins & Hans Boas)
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Maddy K
STA team members: N/A
description/plans: Texas German Dialect Project has been working with us since 2019 to develop a series of banners. All together the banners will act as an interactive “museum” one can walk through & learn about TGDP’s research. This will be the second banner in the series! Our goal is to be making about 1 banner per month throughout the summer.
To be completed: June

So this is my first time using InDesign in a while. It’s also the largest file size in inches (6.5 feet) I’ve ever worked with. As much as I’ve complained about vectors I can definitely see the importance here (flushed emoji).

A lot of the brainpower here went into trying to determine the number of horizontal guides for 10 text boxes, 3 of which were roughly twice as long as the others, so I guess that would suggest 13 rows, but that’s not accounting for space at the top and bottom, nor the image spacing.

My very rough first draft right now has 3 columns and 36 rows (I know), but I might play more with spacing.

Maybe getting more comfortable with InDesign can be my summer goal, since outside of work I’d like to do more writing/publication creative stuff anyways.

HIS 315K The United States, 1492-1865

Just a quick faculty update to some older course graphics – props to some departed STAs I didn’t get to meet for this nice color scheme!