STA Blog

Adrian McKee

Adrian McKee

GOODBYE

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GOODBYE

This came sooner than expected, even for me 😮

:balloons_bye:

I can’t believe it was almost 2 years ago when I first had my Zoom interview with Maddy, Valerie, and Suloni. I still remember Maddy asking about my Zoom background, which was a poppy field in central Asia.

When I started at LAITS, I’d had a lot of odd jobs (food service, babysitting, assisting an airplane mechanic, etc) but the idea of a “real” job in an office seemed daunting.  Now, I’m starting a job on the Apple campus! (For a contractor… and the pay is very entry-level… but still!) I think these 2 years of experience have been the most valuable I’ve ever gotten from a job. I’ll miss everyone from LAITS so much, but the plus side of living in Austin is that I’ll probably see a lot of ya’ll around at places like Hole in the Wall.

Carrie: We didn’t get to talk that much, but it was really fun going to Jester with you and Thang on presentation week. Hope you’re having fun in China right now and have a good fall semester when you’re back!

Isaiah: It’s been fun for the few weeks we overlapped. I hope you enjoy the design team and keep up the blog title format FOREVER! I am so curious what kind of movie titles you’ll get to in the double digits.

Leilani: Did I ever mention I showed your blog avatar to a friend of mine just because I was so impressed how “swaggy” it was hahahaha. I will miss your sense of humor and your cool hats.

Lorena: Hopefully you’ll be back in the fall to see this! I still remember supervising you on CoLA Web Refresh and drawing the comics together. If not, have fun at your internship. Also have fun in LA!

Luisa: I was about to say I’ll probably see you around thrifting, but then I remembered you’re gonna be in Illinois. Congrats on your grad school gig

Marissa: We didn’t get to talk that much, but I was always really impressed by your designs. Keep it up!

Thang: It was so fun helping you onboard and make that meme together. We haven’t seen each other as much because you’re doing webdev stuff, but I hope you’re having fun in Vietnam and have a great fall.

Valerie: I’m so grateful for your part in getting me this job, and you’ve been a great manager for these 2 years, in terms of both accommodating my schedule AND playing cool lofi nintendo/ghibli music. I look forward to seeing where you go from here and seeing more of your art in the future.

rocking cat emojirocking cat emoji:rocking_cat:

And most of all I will miss these SLACK EMOJIS (jk)

Best of luck everyone!

 

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Week LXXX

We made it all the way to 80!

Course Graphics: E 316M: Masterworks of American Literature

This past week I mostly worked on UTFC bookkeeping and offboarding bookkeeping, so the last thing of note to put on my blog is a routine course graphics update, adding instructor to this title slide.

How long ago was it now that I became the “course graphics guy”? A year and a half? Wow.

Goodbye post coming soon.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2023/06/20/49201-2/

Week LXXVIII

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Week LXXIX

As of yesterday, my two weeks notice is formally in ;__;

I’ve accepted a contract tech job starting sometime in the next few weeks, even though I would have preferred a mellow summer and staying at LAITS til August, I guess I underestimated how fast hiring can move. I’ll be writing my goodbyes next week, but in the meantime…

French Textbook

The only thing I’ve worked on since last meeting, and perhaps my last project at LAITS.

 

We’re using the (now renamed) spreadsheet I made to track the sources of various images, and finally confirming all the replacement images with Yazz.

I guess I figured my very last project would be something more full-circle, but it’s another routine and inconclusive spreadsheet. Hm, I guess that makes sense in its own way.

Week LXXVIII

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Week LXXVIII

TGDP Documentation

Besides some minor tweaks to banner 7, my main project this week has been documenting the TGDP process for future STAs. It may not be very visually flashy, but it’s been an intense process combing through a year of moderately disorganized files and memories to standardize everything.

The end result is a higher standard than my own process has used so far, but hopefully we can stick to it going forward. I also started working on a master template, though of course the layout varies so much that it’s more of an example of how different elements CAN be formatted.

Edit: I now have the whole template done 😮

Week LXXVII

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Week LXXVII

French Textbook

Okay, this was something I should have updated on here last week, but forgot. And I only worked 1 day since our last meeting, so…

Maddy asked me to replace the sky on this photo of Kigali.

I wondered how to do this for a bit, but it turns out photoshop has a “replace sky” tool. Turned out nice!

Here is Leilani in front of it:

🙂

Week LXXVI

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Week LXXVI

TGDP 7

This was the main thing I worked on after finishing the biostats logo. I had a list of edits and a suggested layout from the clients, but had trouble making it fit exactly right… the end result was 3 alternative layouts. One closer to the original, one with a larger map, and one with 2 columns. Waiting to hear back which is preferred.

Bio 311D

Project: Bio 311D backdrops
Client /Prof: (?)
completion status: Done
staff guidance: Maddy K
STA team members: Adrian
description/plans: Unit backdrops for Bio
To be completed: Friday 5/26

This was a fun one! While it may have been mostly photo sourcing, it required some bio research (yay!). For making 3 backdrops for different units of a bio course, the professor provided some guidance in the form of example clipart. Also, Maddy provided a nice template she used to make unit 4 (ecology) already.

The first unit was genetics and micro-evolution, which entails individual speciation, heredity, and cell biology. The provided pictures were this:

Final backdrop (a mixture of pictures from stock sites and wikimedia) ended up like this:

The second unit was macroevolution, a little more abstract. The only example graphics were a few phylogeny trees.

The topic itself includes larger evolutionary changes such as evolution of new organs, mass extinctions, adaptive radiation such as the Cambrian explosion, and horizontal gene transfer. I took some liberties and included more paleontological stuff to make it more visually interesting.

Final unit was physiology, the most straightforward.

I found some nice Unsplash photos of plastic organ models, which are more interesting than flat diagrams/clipart and less grisly than real anatomy photos. Perfect.