Piazza Replacement: 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…

Piazza Replacement: Branding/Logo Ideas

First off, in case you don’t know what Piazza is, Piazza is “a course-based Q&A discussion board for students, professors, and TAs.” Furthermore, this winter break LAITS will be developing a replacement tool for Piazza that is unique to UT, and it will be called CHATTER. On that note, this new discussion board will need a logo/branding to accompany it.

For this assignment I was tasked to brainstorm some sketches for that logo/branding with the goal of getting directions and ideas down on paper. I was also asked to do three things throughout the process:

1. Do not feel like I must include a graphic element, since a text-based logo can be just as strong in the right cases.
2. Consider the tone of the brand: Friendly – Academic – Learning oriented – Community – Asking questions – Sharing knowledge – Safe-space
3. I was asked to please avoid Longhorn imagery, since it’s owned by TX Athletics

And with all of that in mind, I got down to business and sketched out some of my ideas. This is how they turned out:

My reasoning behind these sketches goes as follows:

1. “Chatter” in capital letters and make the spaces inside the A and R into chat boxes 💬
2. “Chatter” in lowercase letters and make the C and the spaces inside the a and e into chat boxes 💬
3. Chatter, but put the C inside a chat box
4. Chatter divided inside two chat boxes (my favorite version)
5. Learning version: person saying Chatter
6. Academic version: person saying Chatter
7. Option 4 but inside a laptop – because this discussion board will be online
8. Need Help? Chatter style poster (not the most viable option, I know)
9. Based on the squirrels on campus (since we cannot use Longhorn imagery)
10. Based on the squirrels on campus (since we cannot use Longhorn imagery)
11. Use the UT tower somehow, maybe as an exclamation mark

HIS315K: Presentation Remake

🎶 It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas 🎶 🎄

Hello there blog, once again we meet. Classes are finally over for the semester, and ’tis the season for finals… But it’s also December and everyday we are closer to my favorite holiday of the year, so I’m very excited about that. Nevertheless, I’m here to work and work I shall. So let me explain what this activity was about.

 

For this activity, I was tasked to remake one of the presentations made by Dr. Robert Olwell for his HIS 315K course. The presentation I worked with was specifically the one titled “Old Spain to New Spain” which was exciting because I do know a bit about Spain’s history. That being said, the only thing I really had to do for this task was to transfer the information from his past format to the new template Maddy prepared. This is partly how that turned out:

 

Basic Training: Online Course Graphics

Style A & B

Hey blog! Long time no see! It’s been a while since my last post, but I blame that on Thanksgiving break. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Anyway, back to work.

 

The goal of this activity was to practice creating Style A and Style B course packages. “Course packages” meaning a group of different yet cohesive graphics meant to be used on Canvas and within remote online courses. The two styles differ in a few ways one from the other:

 

 

Considering the purpose of this basic training is to learn and practice this stuff without the pressure of having to please a client, I was allowed to do the activity as if it were for my favorite course I’ve taken at UT, a course I really liked, or a course I look forward to taking. So I chose the Intro to Biological Anthropology course I took last semester, mainly because I wanted to use an image of a lemur, monkey or ape for Style B. ( I guess I just like taking these basic trainings as opportunities to produce content for cute animals… hence everything I’ve done for penguins, hehe)

 

Furthermore, the tools I needed to work on for this training were mostly Photoshop and PowerPoint, both of which I’ve had much experience in the past with; so I didn’t have difficulty working with those tools. I did ask for a lot of feedback from my peer mentors and to Maddy (our design coordinator) regarding design queries, though. For instance, on working with a cohesive color palette, on spacing issues, on policies regarding the shortening words like introduction → intro, color balancing for Style 2, etc. Bellow you can see how my two styles of packages turned out:

Style A

Style B

Once I was done designing both packages, I then followed the instructions on learning how to upload the graphics destined for Canvas (the Canvas Homepage Banner, Dashboard, and the Call-Out Buttons) onto the course. This is how that turned out:

 

Homepage Banner & Call-Out ButtonsDashboard

Basic Training: Canvasser Game

The basic purpose of this activity was to “learn about the process of creating a Canvasser interactive from start to finish by looking at examples created by past STAs.” I also had to create my own interactive game! This game will eventually be played by other STA’s, too.

The requirements of this game were as follows:

• Should be educational
• Must be related to the theme of my CLIO module
  • (since that’s where it’s meant to be uploaded)

But before getting down to business, I first had to propose a detailed plan for my instructional game design. So this is what I proposed:

*the parts in bold are the prompts I was given to plan my game proposal*

• What specific information or concept do you want to teach in your game? How will it supplement the rest of the content on your CLIO site?
  • I want my game to use the same kind of questions that are in the second quiz from my CLIO module: I want people to match movie titles.
• What is the best game format for that information?
  • I think the combination of a matching game and popups is the ideal format for this game. I want it to work like this example but less constricted by the chart format.
  • This is what the example I linked looks like:
  • 
• What kind of aesthetic will your game have? Think about how you can use colors and other visuals to make your game more cohesive and engaging.
  • I want my game to follow the same kind of retro game format but I want to add a few more colors to it. I want to do something with a black background and with colorful elements in the foreground. Maybe something like the Mario’s Underground.
• What types of assets (buttons, popups, click-and-drag objects) will be needed?
  • I want to use the click-and-drag option for matching, and popups to tell the user if they are correct of if they should try again.

After this plan was approved, I started working on the design on my game. The basic requirements for this portion of the training were to include:

• • • A Begin Filter (including: a begin screen and a begin button)
    • Popups (text boxes to appear on command)
    • Clickable Elements (including: buttons, toggle elements, and drag objects)
    • Stationary Elements (those not meant to have any sort of interactive action, i.e. the background and such)

I started out by making the begin filter. I made a green start button and a screen with a black background and a bunch of little pixelated stars. Then I reduced the opacity of this begin screen so that the stationary elements would still be visible behind the begin filter when the user started the game.

 

Then I moved on to making the stationary elements. I included a black background and added a few layers of brick icons to organize further elements I would include. I also included the movie posters for four of the movies that anyone who’s playing this game should have already learned from going through my CLIO module. And finally, I included the movie titles in both languages (English and Spanish) along a few fake titles in Spanish, so that the user could then chose from two different translated titles when playing the game. (I also made 4 hidden location shapes in layers beneath the stationary one so when I eventually uploaded all of these elements to Canvasser, I could use those shapes to define the space where the stars should be dropped on and marked as correct/incorrect).

 

Then I made the clickable elements. I decided to use different colored stars as the draggable objects to be dragged and dropped over the movie posters to match the proper translated title with the corresponding poster. I also made an instructions button so that when pressed it would open a popup describing the instructions of my game.

 

Finally, I made the popups. I made three of them. One was the instruction popup that I mentioned explaining how the game works. Then I made one for when the answers were correct, and one for when they were wrong.

After all of this was approved by my peer mentors, I exported all of these elements to eventually upload into Canvasser and start assembling my game there. I learned how to upload and save my files into Canvasser, how to set up my workspace, how to convert those files into objects, how to name them, etc. Then I learned all of the interactive commands that would fit my game, such as activating and deactivating the popups, how to make elements draggable, so on and so forth. When I was done, and my peer mentors checked that the game was up and running I then added the game into my CLIO module under the Quiz 2 Activity.

All in all it was a completely new experience, but I learned a lot from it.  Anyway, here is a link to my game, feel free to check it out! https://laits.utexas.edu/canvasser/canvasser_content/canvasser-games/villarreal-cristina-canvasser-game.html