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Rachel Sacks

Rachel Sacks

AFR week # ?????

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It is almost Halloween! Rejoice! Beware of small children!

AFR Graphics for early November

Last week I was assigned several graphics for AFR that are due November 3-5th (roughly 2 weeks from now.) These were definitely on the more complex side, although we found some ways to combat the challenges they brought.

Graphic #1

This one was the most straight-forward of the three. Essentially, we had to present a cultural cycle where certain values are taught to children, which they learn and replicate as adults, and then teach to their children in the future.

We represented this as a flow chart. The first draft looked like this:

We then combined the two separate graphs together and made the arrows smaller to fit within the style guide:

What I learned:

Keep arrows in the style guide, keep most graphics in the style guide unless there is a specific need not to. Make sure to include the spaces where different pieces will go (like text or the spot where the professor’s face shows up in the presentation) to help format things better.

Graphic #2:

The second graphic was much more complicated, due to the huge variety in metrics used for statistics:

The first statistic uses exact population, the second uses a proportion, and the third uses a percentage, as well as referring to age and not time period. In my attempt to get all three graphs in, my initial draft of this ended up being quite cluttered:

This would’ve been especially difficult to see, considering how small the actual slide looks when it’s being presented. We took another approach and came up with something like this:

This was a huge visual improvement, but was still too small for the professor to see. We’ve decided to have each graph on it’s own slide, like this:

This is about how it will look, although furthermore, the jail cells need to be a proportion with the hat, not an unequal sign. I will update the other graphs as well as graphics for the third slide when they’ve been done!

What I learned:

Text needs to be bigger, less is often more when it comes to reducing the visual load.

History of Design Training

Finally, I revisited the History of Design Training on my off time, and started an art nouveau illustration after I re-read through all the content. Here’s the draft so far, which I work on when I have down time from AFR:

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Ignore how sketchy it is! It’ll be better with the line-art.

Oct. 5-11

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Week of Oct. 5-11th

Hello! Somehow, it is nearing mid-October. How does it go so fast? The world may never know.

AFR 303 Course Graphics

This past week has been pretty slow due to a lull in graphics needed. Yesterday, our team was assigned more graphics that are collectively due for lectures in early November. We just learned of this a bit before my shifted ended yesterday, so I haven’t had a chance to begin my graphics much yet. However, I did have time to create a nifty rounded arrow for flow charts:

Behold: it’s rounded-ness.

Otherwise, the graphics themselves are a WIP. I will update this blog later in the week when they have more progress!

A & B Course Graphics Training

This past week I also completed the A&B Course Graphics Training. I made some adjustments to the B-style graphics, and changed some of the UT lettering to black, before I implemented them into the templates. Here are the templates for both Style A & B:

 

 

After I completed these, I uploaded the style B banner and buttons into my Canvas Sandbox, and voila-

The class I wish I could take but is sadly fake has been completed,

 

 

Spooky Month Commenced: AFR and Trainings

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Spooky Month Commenced: AFR and Trainings

It is here! The best month of the year!

AFR Graphics

This past week was somewhat lighter on the AFR graphic assignments. My primary assignment was to turn a 6-circle venn-diagram into something more digestible and aesthetically pleasing. The diagram I got looked like this:

 

The diagram itself is not aligned well and the colors get muddy when they are combined. At first, I wasn’t sure exactly how to mimic this in our style without changing the style of the Venn diagram. When I tried to copy it verbatim with our color style in, it ended up having the same issue.

I tried a few other versions with less variety in colors…

All of these had the same basic issue – the colors still become muddy and hard to see. I tried another version where I manually chose colors and didn’t rely on opacity to create the Venn diagram.

This was getting closer. The primary issue with this is that the size of the overlap is huge, while the text is relatively small and squished to the side. After getting confirmation that I could, in fact, change the style of the diagram altogether, I was able to explore other options that would make the diagram easier to read and have larger text.

 

The one on the left looks cool – like stained glass – but it ended up being too clunky for the art style. The in the middle and right are based on a “flower” style Venn diagram where each piece serves as a petal on the flower and there is an open center area. This ended up being the route to go, and Maddy liked the one on the right the most. The final version had a third layer of overlap:

And voila, a flower in bloom! I was very happy with how this came out, and again want to thank Abriella and Maddy for all their help on this (also thank you Valerie for looking over it too.)

What I learned…

To document a few things I learned from doing this particular graphic:

  • For most art styles, and especially for AFR, having just a few hues and relying on varying shades of these hues looks better than pulling a ton of different colors together.
  • Venn Diagrams do not need to actually be the traditional Venn shape to get the point across – especially if they are trying to combine more than 4 circles together.
  • While changing opacity can be a handy trick to get an in between color, it can sometimes also end up being muddy. When you are changing the tint or shade of a hue to create accent colors, you usually want to move the hue over slightly to be either a bit cooler or warmer. If you don’t do this, the color ends up looking muddy, and a bit like Clip-Art from 2005. Manually selecting the different colors in the graph can avoid this altogether, although it is more work.
  • Avoid lines for this art style. At all costs. (There are times when it may need to be used, but try to prevent this.)

Trainings

After finishing up this graphic, I began to wok on my trainings again. I haven’t had a chance to touch them since I did the AFR Stinger assignment, so this is a good chance for me to catch up. I had done the A-style graphic format in late August/early September. Yesterday, I drafted up much of the B style for my imaginary class. Here are some parts:

…I wish I could actually take this course.

I’ll finish this training up soon and combine it with the A style graphics for my sandbox course. Then, I’ll move onto some other trainings. I’m really excited to work on the ones that require drawing/art/design in them!

Week 5: graph-ics

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Hello!

Most of this past week has been dedicated to beginning the AFR 303 Project.

I worked with Abriella and Sheryl to create graphics for the slides for the lecture on 9/29. We had a deadline Monday 9/27, which will be consistent for our lectures in the future. The first graphic I created was for a slide documenting the rates of poverty in Texas by race. The initial slide we got was a bit hard to read, but fortunately not too confusing.

The primary issue here is visual spacing and lack of illustration. Without a graph, the statistics sit in a more abstract zone that may be harder for students to comprehend. Additionally, the slide is very left aligned and there’s a lot of negative space on the right that can be worked with.

I used Maddy and Abriella’s stunning style guide to guide me through the process of making my first graphic. As I was getting used to the process, I struggled a bit to figure out how to align a large bar graph on a 16:9 slide. I went through some trial and error…

This version worked to omit vertical negative space but had the same problem as the slide above – too much space on the right.

This version was an improvement, but the two segments were cramped and there was a ton of space on both the left and right sides that could be utilized. I kept moving things around until finally I determined that side-by-side seems to work the best. (I also decided to add a little Texas next to the people statistics because (a) it helps the graph signify that this is in Texas and (b) it is cute.)

This way both graphs get enough space, and since the graph is pretty short horizontally, the negative space is less than if they were stacked vertically.

On the final slide, Maddy added a separate small, lighter box around the Poverty Rates graph which really helped segment the two graphs. Seeing this has inspired me to use that technique in my next set of graphs!

For the second slide, I created a graphic for the terms “De Jure” and “De Facto.” The initial version I had was a bit too busy, and Abriella assisted me with creating a version that is a bit easier on the eyes.

Maddy added this into the slide and made it look great!

I definitely agree with the decision to make the not equal sign much smaller. The De facto slide graphic was also used on another slide:

I will get my assignment for next week either at the end of today (?) or (more likely) tomorrow. This has been very fun to do so far, and I am excited to create more now that I am more familiar with the style guide and formatting.

Wrapping up the Animation Stinger refresh…

After over a month of work, it seems the Animated Stinger refresh project is coming to a close. Ideally, it should be completely finished by the end of next week. I’ve set a personal goal to try and get it done by Thursday the 30th, although time is an infinite, false vacuum and there may be some mistakes to be fixed. But generally. I’d like it to be done. Soon. Here is a sneak peak of the TA stinger animation:

look at her go!

Finally, the Blog Banner.

The gods of Art and Fortune have blessed me (for once), and my blog banner was chosen for the website.

As you can see, I was delirious from sleep deprivation while creating this, and ended up creating UT in an alternate dimension, My initial idea was to have everyone on a moon crater, but I ended up playing around with making the bottom area water, and this sort of happened. As a result, everyone is walking on water in the final rendition…

Everyone’s caricatures are so well-made and cute that it made it extremely entertaining to place them into the banner. I wanted to put everyone closer to the middle, but alas there was not enough space. If you are on the ends, please do not fear, because that’s where the anime protagonists always sit in class. Anyway… please let Marianne know that I apologize for thinking she was grapes and not raspberries. And thank you all for voting for mine!

Now I must stare at my own art all year. Will this bother me? Probably, but maybe it will be a test of strength.

(May the) Fourth Week (Be with you)

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As you can see, I have figured out how to add fun sparkly text to my blog. This is purely for fun, although I imagine the skills will come in handy in the future!

I dedicated most of this week to working on the TA Graphic Stinger Design. It’s been a bit tricky to figure it out, although I have had some wonderful feedback from Maddy, De’sha, and Suloni!

Before I get more into that, here are the final versions of the Chat and Insta-Poll stingers.

 

 

These have been finalized, and should be accessible within the finalized After Effects file – so they’re basically ready to go!

We went through a few stages with the TA Stinger and still haven’t finalized it quite yet (I will post an update on this before Tuesday if we make more progress.) The initial animation I had drafted had looked like this, but the graphic honestly looks a bit too much like the Chat stinger and doesn’t have a lot going for it.

 

 

I drafted up a few separate ideas for the new TA stinger, trying to keep up with how the actual Tower Canvas discussion looks:

The goal here is to mimic the idea of a conversation between a TA and a student without it seeming too much like the TA is more valuable than the student. The initial design seemed to imply that, so we wanted to avoid this in the new design. After several iterations of exchanging ideas, we landed with two separate ones. One that looks more like a traditional chat exchange, and one that looks more like the Canvas Tower page.

On Monday, I am planning to try and combine these two ideas together to create another draft. I will update with this if possible!

I also spent a portion of this week on creating my banner for the banner competition, although that is secret redacted information. I may share it later on, though, after the competition is over. It was a lot of fun designing and painting my banner! It can sometimes be difficult to add typography to a more painterly-style image, so I had to experiment with a few different styles to find something I liked.

Week 3: electric booga-tree?

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Hello and welcome to my third week blog post! I can’t believe I’ve been here almost a month now, it’s gone by so fast! I really like what I’m working on, so it’s easy for me to sort of get sucked into my work. Often I have trouble getting myself to stop for the day and log off, but it’s a skill I’m working on. Sometimes you need to take a break and just, you know…

V I B E 

…anyway! This week, I spent most of my time creating the stinger animations in after effects. It was a pretty straight forward process, although I had some issues with After Effects crashing when I had too many keyframes visible at once. Fortunately, it was an easy fix (restarting the program), and I didn’t even have to turn the computer off and on again!

The first drafts for the Chat Stinger had a version with extra bubbles, and one without:

With bubbles

Without bubbles

 

We ultimately decided on the second one without the additional bubbles. The extra animation cluttered up the screen a bit too much, and with these types of graphics, less is often more. Next, Suloni suggested I create a version where the “…” on the chat bubble comes back and forth. I initially wanted to have it appear and disappear 3x, but 2x ended up fitting much better within the 4 second time frame of these graphics. This is the current version I have made:

For the Insta-poll animation, I was able to adhere pretty close to the animatic I made for it. The first draft looked like this:

In the second draft, I added in a fade-in, and a little pop-in to the three dots on the side of the circle, pretty much the exact same way I did the ellipses on the Chat stinger. I’m not sure if we’re going to keep that in, but I think the effects adds a little pizzazz to the animation without overpowering the text.

Next week I will continue making changes to this, as well as create the animation for the TA Discussion stinger. I’ve already imported that into after effects, and plan to animate the “discussion” bars growing, as well as possible some sort of entrance transition if it does not make it too busy.

Finally, this week I created the caricature of myself for the STA Blog banner! Here is me and my amazing cat Travis.

Here are some actual photos of Travis to brighten your day: