Hello all. Turkey (or tofurkey) day is almost upon us. Have this picture of Pirate judging my music taste.

This past week I’ve been doing a cocktail of things, enumerated below for your benefit:

COLA Web Refresh Project

As the actual migration bit has wrapped up for the Dean’s sites and we have not received any help or support requests, I’ve been reaching out to departments, centers, institutes, programs, and research units to gather contacts for the next phase of the project (to commence in January), as well as assessing each site for size, complexity, etc. I’ve heard back from the majority of the units assigned to me. We will likely try to reach out again sometime after Thanksgiving but before the holidays.

Photo IDs 

There haven’t been any this week 🙁

HIS 314K Zamora 

I reformatted a PPT from this professor on Wednesday.

Pages STA Essentials

A little while back, I sat in on a LAITS / Public Affairs meeting and showed them what I had prepared as a possible resource for CMSTAs present and future. It will ultimately live in the KB. Chris suggested that I add information on exporting image assets as well as max/min image sizes, so I did that as well as adding and adjusting other information on the doc.

I also need to add info on alt text, but I might wait to do that until I meet with Maddy and Estella after Thanksgiving to discuss the accessibility KB (as well as how principles and guidelines of accessibility can be integrated into the STA program more broadly).

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/42613-2/

As of last Monday evening, the redesigned Dean’s sites are live! You can view them at the same URL as before. Everyone involved has expressed their satisfaction and excitement w/ the sites, so I was very happy to be part of this effort. Here are a couple screenshots.

 

Now that that’s finished, and pending any help / edit requests (which usually go to Public Affairs anyway), the COLA refresh team has started finding and reaching out to contacts from all the units in COLA (this includes departments, centers, institutes, research units, programs, and so forth). There are over a hundred of them, so it’s a pretty big undertaking that requires a bit of back and forth.

 

Hi blog, it’s been a bit.

 

Yesterday, I spent part of my usual shift time at an Austin Design Week event with Maddy and Valerie, about web accessibility at an office called Microassist near Shoal Creek. This office specializes in providing trainings to public and private organizations as well as running accessibility checks. It’s the official tech training firm for the State of Texas as well as certain federal offices.

 

We listened to their Lead Accessibility Analyst give a presentation on what web accessibility is & why it matters. He kept it brief and to the point, but some points that stuck with me:

 

• Maintaining accessibility is the right thing to do. But for public (and private!) organizations, compliance is a big issue as well.
• The web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) are exactly just that… guidelines. In a manner of speaking, they are the bare minimum.
• It’s imperative that accessibility be a continual point of reference throughout the development process (this means including designers, web and software developers, quality assurance specialists, and everyone else involved in the conversation). It’s much, much easier to resolve issues as you go rather than retroactively “correct” things.
• Never make visual cues the sole means of conveying information.

Anyway, all in all very interesting and inspiring event. More blog posts to come soon!

Pages (COLA Web Refresh)

We’re about done with Phase II of the COLA Web Refresher Project, meaning the Dean’s COLA sites will soon be frozen and online soon. Most of the bare bones content migration was done, so I and the other CMSTAs spent a good amount of time QAing the various pages (checking for broken links, formatting or content areas, adding/editing alt text, low res graphics). I made some rather last minute edits to the College Leadership page, making sure at least the photos were there even if the specs weren’t perfect.

I can’t wait for the next phase of this project and am so happy to be part of such an efficient and capable team. The team will also burgeon — the last candidate for a CMSTA position is being interviewed next week, and after that decisions and on-boarding should begin.

 

HIS 314K

I did another powerpoint.

 

Photo IDs

More photo IDs! Responded to a request from Sarah regarding some IDs submitted a while back that got buried.

 

Web and Image Training for CMSTAs

In between more time sensitive tasks, I’ve been slowly but surely developing the web and image STA training (for Pages specifically). A lot of this is about photo cropping, exporting, etc. etc. that is crucial for the Pages CMS. I also want to see if we can find a user-friendly alternative to Photoshop for the end users who don’t have / don’t know how to use this program, so we’re not flooded with image resizing requests (Canva?). Anyway, I presented it to the LAITS and PR teams and plan on adding a section on file sizes and exporting.

 

Pirate

I got a new rug, with two rather abstract cat illustrations on it. Pirate and her brother were initially terrified by it, but it’s now one of her most favorite spots!

I completed the Photo Sourcing and Color Grading training, which taught me how to use gradient maps and color matching to create a coherent aesthetic or style for images. I found this training super fun and easy, and thought I’d share my results below —

For the gradient map part I was asked to choose my favorite film as a starting point. I don’t exactly know if I have a favorite film, to be honest, but Suspiria (1977) is definitely one of my favorites, so I went with it. It’s a stunning movie that I recommend to anyone who hasn’t seen it!

I used the following screencap as a source for colors:

Here were the resultant images:

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/suspiria/

COLA Web Refresh Project

Work has continued on this project. I’ve been continuing client communication, specifically for the Academic Enrichment sites. All the CM STAs submitted the checks for understanding Google Form, so I’ll be calling Suloni today on Slack to discuss next steps.

Also, Crystal granted me access to UT’s Image Relay, a repository of UT photography used by University Communications for me to use for certain pages that need an image refresh (which is many pages).

Also, I created new buttons for the Maymester and Faculty Led Pages, as the program offerings have changed:

I also created a new banner for ASL on the Languages set of pages, trying to mimic the style of the original designer as much as possible

Before:

After:

HIS 314K PPTs

I reformatted another HIS315K ppt.

The Devil/Pirate Wears Prada

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/pirate-wears-prada/