Second Week Back

Over break I decided take a few classes this semester part-time, and luckily I was able to get into some good classes at the last minute, which means I’m able to continue working as an STA (this is my second week back).

I spent last week finishing up the Cascade documentation, all of which has now been moved over to the UT site:

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/web-admin-help/index.php

Then I got an assignment from a client to update the logo/word mark for the Laboratory for Ethnic and Race Equity (LAESER) website. Their current logo looks like this:

The original design was low resolution and grainy, so the client wanted a new version at a higher resolution and a new font, but with everything else kept the same. I made some mockups in Illustrator yesterday using the fonts she specified and saved it as a viewable PDF, which I sent over for approval:

I traced the triangles with the pen tool and used the eyedropper to get the colors from the original. To get the triangle shapes to be more precise I drew lines over them using the line tool, then Windows > Pathfinder > Divide to slice and delete the excess area, using the original as a guide underneath.

Last Day as an STA

It’s my last day working as an STA! This has a been an amazing job to have as a college student and I’m so grateful for the opportunity. I’ve been able to learn a lot about the process of design creation and workflow in a professional setting, which has been really helpful to me as an English major looking to develop my tech and design skills.

Suloni has been a kind and patient supervisor to me and I’ve enjoyed working with all the STAs. I’m taking some time off this spring so I won’t be returning next semester, but I’m hoping to be back for the summer months, so I’m looking forward to that!

Bridget

VLabs

Last week I finished copying content for my assigned labs into the new site. The next phase will be making the interactives, which is going to take awhile since many of the assets need to be created in Photoshop before that can be made into clickable interactives using Canvasser.

Yesterday Estella taught me how to make web interactives in Canvasser and I started working the first one, which will be a practice exercise for everyone to get to learn how to make the interactives and get to the same level in Canvasser. I was a little intimidated to try this since I’m not as computer savvy as some of the other STAs and Canvasser scares me a little bit but it wasn’t actually that bad. Writing down the steps and repeating them until I got the hang of it helped me.

Here’s a link to the interactive that I made:

https://laits.utexas.edu/canvasser/canvasser_content/bridget-test/bridget-test.html

Russian

I also made a few illustrations this past week for Tate and Kathy. The first one is an illustration showing a raised body temperature on a celsius thermometer, drawn in a semi-realistic style, similar to wikihow illustrations. I pulled the flesh tones and background color from an example illustration Kathy showed us and modeled the thermometer/hand after a few copyright-free images. The second is an illustration of a bath brush that I did for Tate, which I also used a reference photo for. All of these objects are made in Adobe Animate as vector images, and since they’re being used for animations they don’t require as much detail, so I only added a bit of texture on the bristles of the brush to add some dimension (initially I had two tones on the wooden handle but I went back to one color to keep it more minimal). I really enjoyed doing these illustrations so I hope I get more assignments soon!

RUS 412 Objects

Dry erase board eraser

Apple peeler