STA Blog

Maddy Kaniewski

Maddy Kaniewski

Last Day as an STA

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Last Day as an STA

Wow, almost one full year as a design STA has kind of flown by!  It’s been a wild ride since last summer, from animating monkey bones in Canvasser to creating entire studio sets to now: working from home 2 feet from my bed… and all along it has been such a pleasure getting to work with ya’ll, such talented and creative designers. I am so grateful to have had a job like this that emphasized learning and growing not only as a designer, but also as a teammate and leader. The STA program is truly special and I can only hope future students dreaming of careers in graphics/coding/video/audio/production will find it too.

 

I will miss you all so much..PSYCH!!!

 

I’m a full timer now baby!! I’ve been hired on for this next year+ to help manage the Design team and work with other first-years to manage LAITS COVID-19 fall semester. What a relief, because a) steady employment during COVID is rare and I feel extremely blessed, and b) I don’t have to say goodbye to everyone here!! I look forward to building my skills in project management, art direction, and leadership – crucial considering I hope to start my own business/freelance career in the future. I feel grateful to be a part of ya’lls journeys as we all pursue our careers in design etc, and I hope to be an encouraging presence along your path. I will work to incorporate diversity and inclusion into my everyday practice (Check out this event happening tomorrow: Where are the Black designers?). It is a lot of hard work to “make it” as a creative but I really believe in supporting one another and sharing the opportunity. See ya’ll on Monday 🙂

STA Handbook

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STA Handbook

While prepping for summer orientation, I revamped the STA Handbook design. Since it’s one of the first documents a new STA sees, it deserves some love. It is designed to look like a composition book, full of hand-drawn doodles. Since all STAs are students, I thought this would be a cute and relatable theme and maybe make them feel some common ground with new coworkers.

 

I designed it in Google Slides so it’s extremely easy for team leads to edit in the future.

 

Sexing History

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Sexing History Lesson Plans

Since my last post I have started working full time, mostly helping plan orientation for our new summer hires. There is a lot to prep training ~8 new STAs remotely but I’m excited to meet them and get started!

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Other than that, I have been designing lesson plans for Sexing History, a podcast unearthing facts about sex and sexuality from the past. They want to offer lesson plans for teachers to teach in tandem with the podcast.

 

I wanted my design to reflect their brand, which utilizes a lot of vintage imagery. So, I opted for a serif font (Garamond) and some detailed page borders/lines to make it look more “traditional.” Still, it needed to be scannable and easy to read, so I split it into two columns and created a system that bolds sources and tools when they are listed in-text. I could imagine a teacher printing this out and wanting to leave notes to them-self while teaching, so left big blank margins for them to do so. I did this work in InDesign and got a lot use out of its rulers and guides feature.

 

 

It is always tricky to lay out large blocks of provided text in a cohesive way, which is most evident on pages 4 and 5. When having to make tough cut-off decisions I opted to keep ideas together over visual design since the document is for practical use, and it being nicely designed is a perk, not necessary for teaching.

 

COM so far

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More COM 301!

We made some more progress thanks to Thuy and Abriella this week! The final keyframes are looking gooood!

 

 

As for next steps, I want to add some subtle/abstract background to the frames so that they won’t be floating on white space. We also will need to draw final versions of the icons in Frame 11 once the sketches are approved.

 

Title Stingers

The course is also made up of three segments, each of which needs a title card and ~5 second animation. Here are my drafts so far, in the same style and color palette.

 

 

 

Note… the professor’s set for the “Q&A” portion of the class is modeled after Zach Galifianakis’ Between Two Ferns interview series… hence the ferns. 🙂

 

Once all this is finalized we can start animation!!

LACS Icons

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Icons

I created an infographic for Liberal Arts Career Services based on Bridget’s template design. As a team we’d already made 3 of the necessary icons, but I designed icons to represent public orgs + corporations. It’s a challenge to create a simple design that represents such a broad descriptor but I think they came out nicely!

 

 

COM 301E

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COM 301E Updates

We have made quite a bit of progress on COM, with all basic character designs and keyframes approved by our client.

 

You can see some more detailed WIP posts from Abriella and Thuy. I’ve assigned them some next steps of finalizing colors and creating the laptop and globe in frames 7-9.

 

The next phase is designing frame 11 to include icons that represent each Moody College department. Valerie and I collaborated some with our clients on ideas, such as a podium sketch for Communications and Leadership and some digital metrics for advertising. We are purposefully choosing modern representations of each department which is in line with the course and the Moody brand. This means avoiding drawing a simple newspaper for journalism, or a billboard for advertising, etc.