Bye for now!

I’m logging off for the summer – catch me again in the fall!

Humanities Banner

I got a small assignment last week to create a new web banner for the Humanities Institute and upload it to Cascade. I made a few drafts in Illustrator with the institute’s new logo.

The drafts are either solid or textured or blue or gray. The texture is the ball-and-line element from the logo faded almost all the way into the background to add depth and dress up the banner a bit. The color version of the logo’s dom color is blue (hence the blue option) and the grayscale version was provided to give some options.

Finished GOV banners and more!

I finished up the government retractable banner project this past week, so be on the lookout for graduation banners in front of Batts Hall soon! I also presented my work on the Texas Politics Project’s social media graphics suite to (all of) LAITS on Monday. I’ll be signing off for the summer here in a few weeks, so dear reader, I will miss you!

 

FINAL-GOV-banner-dept FINAL-GOV-banner-grad

Gov banners and more

I finished up course graphics for both microeconomics and rhetoric! I got a new assignment last week to make retractable print banners (big ones) for the government department. They want two — one generic, with logos, and one for graduation (“congratulations, class of 2021”). I’ve made a ton of drafts (read: 15) and am waiting on feedback from the client.

In other news, I hear we’re starting a new training curriculum for web dev STAs, which is neat. I’ll be helping with it even though I’m not a web dev person: I’m writing up lessons on certain elements in CLIO — google forms and CSS flip cards, specifically, which loyal readers will recall I used in the D&I CLIO course we worked on over winter break.

This week: course graphics

It’s that time of the semester again. Last week, I got two course graphics assignments, one for a microeconomics course and the other for a rhetoric course (but it’s on coding, so…)

 

Each are pretty straightforward, but they also have their quirks. Like I detailed in last week’s blog post, I created a hybrid image with Photoshop cutouts and image edits for the microeconomics course. We ultimately didn’t use it — instead, we’re using one of the stock images I suggested previously. And for rhetoric, the professor needed not one, not two, but six (yes, six) presentation templates in Keynote, the default Mac presentation software.

 

I hadn’t used Keynote, but it was fairly simple (I daresay more user-friendly that PowerPoint.) I created a template using master slides, then picked a color scheme (the professor wants his presentations color-coded) using coolors.com before making the remaining five presentations.  I created the remaining graphics for that course today, like the callout buttons and the Canvas banner.

 

In other news, my car got dented from a hailstorm (hang in there, Camry!) and I got new blue light blocker glasses, which I highly recommend even as we’re starting to come out of the pandemic.

Microeconomics

So macroeconomics was the hardest AP test I took — no joke, I redrew a graph (in pen!) four times. Oh well. When I got this assignment and noticed it was style B with no pre-chosen image, my brain suddenly grew cobwebs. I had no idea what kind of image to pick: is money too literal? is a city too macro? is a neural net of connections too meta? Who knows, so I suggested all of them.

 

Thankfully, the professors picked a photo. But it was way small, so Poonum suggested I recreate it. (original at bottom, mine at top)

Here’s how I did it.

1. Reverse image search the original image to find the historical image to put into the tablet (I used TinEye, which I usually use for journalistic projects for image verification)
2. Open PSD doc in 1920×1080 and put in historical photo.
3. Search Pexels or something similar for a copyright-free picture of an iPad. I looked for one without anything covering the edge.
4. Cut out the tablet in Photoshop, then put it in the 1920×1080 doc.
5. Search Pexels again, but this time for hands. It took me a few minutes to find a hand in the proper shape to “grip” the tablet.
6. Cut out the hands in Photoshop, then paste them individually into the master doc.
7. Layer the iPad in front of the historical photo and use Quick Select to select the black screen. Hit delete. 
8. Move and resize the photo as needed to fill the iPad screen. Make a group folder for these two.
9. Take the left hand and align it with the iPad so that it looks like it’s gripping it. There will probably be some overlap from fingers we want “behind” the tablet — just erase them with the eraser tool.
10. For me, the other hand looked janky, so I deleted that layer and then duplicated the left hand one, then flipped it so that it looked like a right hand. Add the hands to the iPad+photo group folder. 
11. Back to Pexels. Find a city image. Layer it behind everything.
12. Adjust the size of the hands + iPad + photo as needed.
13. Select the background image layer. Go to color balance and adjust until it matches the hands (for me, this was signifcantly warmer than the original background image).
14. Select one of the hands. Adjust brightness + contrast until it matches the background. Do the same for the other hand and the iPad layer.
15. Done!

Here are the course graphic drafts I’ve made: