Week XXVI

Sort of? I’ll say this covers the week of 2/28-3/03. That’s good enough.

SPN 367C: Spanish for Health Care Professions

We’re waiting on final client feedback, but this one is pretty much wrapped up. I was proud enough to overcome my laziness and actually assemble a design menu for one!

CoLA Web Refresh: Phase III

Not too much to report here yet, but we’re troubleshooting auto-migrated sites and logging how long it takes to go through different sizes of directories. I didn’t make this spreadsheet, so I haven’t bothered to elaborately color-code it yet :p

Norwegian Flyer Design Request

Project: Norwegian Flyer Design Request
Client /Prof: Boas, Hans C
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Suloni Robertson
STA team members: N/A
description/plans: Design a promotional flyer for one of the smaller COLA languages in order to boost enrollment.
To be completed: April 4th

Pretty straightforward – this is the example given by the client. 

They wanted a theme of Norwegian nature/scenery. I was very disappointed to find out John Bauer was Swedish, not Norwegian, but looking more into fairy tale illustrators I remembered Theodor Kittelsen, who did some very nice landscapes too. These 2 are my main drafts for the first round of client feedback, 1 painting and 1 photo.

Lastly, at Suloni’s suggestion, I tried incorporating some Norwegian embroidery and an aurora borealis. Not sure how they look together, but I may end up using the elements in other ways.

Week XXIV

Just a quick biweekly (sorry!) update: CoLA Refresh phase 3 has started with some preliminary content checking, but I’ll wait til we have a little more material to cover that. In the meantime I’ve been working on a couple of course graphics.

Project: Course Graphics – SPN 367D Business in Hispanic Life and Culture
Client /Prof: Mina Ogando Lavin
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Stephen J Lundy
STA team members: N/A
description/plans: Design course graphics for SPN 367D Business in Hispanic Life and Culture
To be completed:Thursday 2/3/22

This one was pretty straightforward; the client requested a photo that showed contrast of ultramodern business and traditional Latin America, so I chose this cathedral in Mexico City.

Project: Course Graphics – SPN 367D Business in Hispanic Life and Culture
Client /Prof: Mina Ogando Lavin
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Stephen J Lundy
STA team members: N/A
description/plans: Design course graphics for SPN 367D Business in Hispanic Life and Culture
To be completed:Thursday 2/3/22

This one is a WIP, and I got a little more creative with the graphics (i.e. I got to throw in my new favorite trick, a grainy paper texture. Also, refreshing myself on how to publish slideshows on WordPress, since I like flipping through the version history of this one.

Week XXII

I’ll be honest; The combination of winter break, a new spring schedule, a new phase of CoLA Refresh, and then a 2 day campus closure have all really thrown off my mental clock. It doesn’t help that, sadly, for scheduling reasons I am not able to attend the weekly design meetings this semester :C

My last update was about 3 weeks ago, and I’ve done a few things since then, but a lot of my workload is very multi-step and not quite finished enough to summarize.

PETEX

The client clarified they wanted photo graphics for this one, which I was… struggling with. I really didn’t have a good frame of reference for how to make text + photo look good, and all my initial attempts were very flat.

I tried searching for references on design sites like Behance, but came up with a lot of illustrative graphics still, collages and vector graphics with photos thrown in. Some of the flashier designs had typography too complex to be a powerpoint template, too. I started a design based off this grid illustration, but didn’t finish before Maddy showed me her draft.

Which was so good, I asked if we could just use that for the course. She told me to look at magazine covers for future reference, if I’m looking for trendy text+photo layouts.

The grid DID find some use as a content slide background. I did get to use my grainy paper texture from the old pipe illustration, eventually…

Introduction to Ancient Rome

This was not actually my project, but I made some minor edits to the canvas graphics for a new professor. The original graphics were done by Abriella, and I just wanted them on my blog because they look nice, but also, I know Michele! Or, at least, I took 1 Greek archaeology class she TA’d for. Makes me jealous I’m not in this class!

It’s also a good example of the little design jobs I’m able to do now. I may be doing some tech support for CoLA Refresh this coming spring too, so if I don’t update on every minor task, I’ll pluck out the most interesting ones.

Project: Course Graphics – Petroleum Extension (PETEX) Pipe Maintenance Training
Client /Prof: N/A
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Stephen J Lundy
STA team members: Ingrid
description/plans: Design course graphics for Petroleum Extension (PETEX) Pipe Maintenance Training
To be completed: January 21st, 2022 tentative

Really quick, I will document a series of drafts for my fifth and final course graphics project.

The graphics are pretty light for this one, with no animations, and mostly slide graphics. The reference slide looked like this:

My very first draft was a cartoony pipe graphic, which may have been a little complex

For the second, I tried following a tutorial to simulate a 3d pipe, which may look too retro

Looking for more references, I took inspiration from this Google result:

And made a flatter pipe graphic

Deciding on a better layout, I simplified it and reintroduced a very soft gradient, but it still looked pretty retro.

Checking Behance for contemporary references, I realized a lot of modern design with gradients adds a grainy texture to spice it up

So I tried the same thing, and it is my personal favorite so far

At Suloni’s suggestion, I made a few desaturated photo edits as well. All are awaiting client feedback.

Course Graphics – GOV 360F Global Governance

Project: Course Graphics – GOV 360F Global Governance
Client /Prof: Terrence Chapman
completion status: Completed
staff guidance: Anne Burke
STA team members: Ingrid
description/plans: Design course graphics for GOV 371U
To be completed: Monday, January 10

For this course, I had a lot of creative leeway too. I kept it a little simpler; the professor suggested photos of world leaders or international org buildings, and since avoiding faces for studio graphics is one of the principles I was taught (it distracts from professors), I went with multiple views of the UN building.

I submitted 2 drafts to the client. Both have an exterior photo of the UN building in New York for the slides, and an interior shot of the General Assembly for the studio background. One is a lighter, more muted daytime exterior photo, with a monochrome interior.

The other was a flashier nighttime photo, with a full color interior.

(Sidenote: the General Assembly room seemed the most professional, but I reviewed all the others in my research – have you seen how crazy the Security Council room is?)

Once the flat graphics were finalized, I once again drafted an even simpler storyboard for Rachel to make pretty.

In her final draft, she added some of those world leader photos from earlier to spice it up, at Maddy’s suggestion.

One design question that came up was whether the intro had to directly transition into the course title slide… I told Rachel I believed it should, but Maddy said it might not matter, so the other Gov course does not transition as smoothly with its animated intro.

Course Graphics – GOV 371U Politics and Film

Project: Course Graphics – GOV 371U Politics and Film
Client /Prof: Shannon Bow O’Brien
completion status: Completed
staff guidance: Anne Burke
STA team members: Ingrid
description/plans: Design course graphics for GOV 371U
To be completed: Monday, January 10

My third official course to design graphics for did not specify a style and came with an exciting note:

“Notes: The professor does not have strong opinions on the look of the course, so there is a lot of freedom here.”

My first idea was to do a movie theater theme. I reasoned that, since this is a Gov department class, the film aspect really stands out; I would have made the graphics more political if it were the same course in a film department. You start outside the theater, with a flashy marquee sign for the course title slide.

For the neon sign, I initially tried following a complicated tutorial from a search result, which gave me a rather… plasticky result.

Starting from scratch, I considered some principles I had learned in drawing, from imitating Star Wars special effects: to make something glow, make it white or off-white, with a surrounding gradient of the actual color you want.

Then, for the lecture title, you have the seating area inside.

And then, for the content slides, a gradient resembling a screen.

For an example of how this looks in powerpoint:

I went with a similar dark red theme for the rest of the assets. The Studio background is a still from Dr Strangelove, which is not only one of my favorite movies, but mentioned in the curriculum and an excellent example of a politically charged film.

I also got to try my hand at animation, and by that I mean drafting out a storyboard in Paint.net on a day I was working from home without access to photoshop, and letting our talented Rachel do the hard part in After Effects.

It came out quite nice!