Course Graphics – GOV 371U Politics and Film

Project: Course Graphics – GOV 371U Politics and Film
Client /Prof: Shannon Bow O’Brien
completion status: Completed
staff guidance: Anne Burke
STA team members: Ingrid
description/plans: Design course graphics for GOV 371U
To be completed: Monday, January 10

My third official course to design graphics for did not specify a style and came with an exciting note:

“Notes: The professor does not have strong opinions on the look of the course, so there is a lot of freedom here.”

My first idea was to do a movie theater theme. I reasoned that, since this is a Gov department class, the film aspect really stands out; I would have made the graphics more political if it were the same course in a film department. You start outside the theater, with a flashy marquee sign for the course title slide.

For the neon sign, I initially tried following a complicated tutorial from a search result, which gave me a rather… plasticky result.

Starting from scratch, I considered some principles I had learned in drawing, from imitating Star Wars special effects: to make something glow, make it white or off-white, with a surrounding gradient of the actual color you want.

Then, for the lecture title, you have the seating area inside.

And then, for the content slides, a gradient resembling a screen.

For an example of how this looks in powerpoint:

I went with a similar dark red theme for the rest of the assets. The Studio background is a still from Dr Strangelove, which is not only one of my favorite movies, but mentioned in the curriculum and an excellent example of a politically charged film.

I also got to try my hand at animation, and by that I mean drafting out a storyboard in Paint.net on a day I was working from home without access to photoshop, and letting our talented Rachel do the hard part in After Effects.

It came out quite nice!

Week XVII

I’m numbering these based on work weeks, not absolute time, which means I’m catching up on the past 3 (2.5) weeks of work. Most of that has been my first real design project, which amounts to five projects so far. I’ll start with the first two:

Project: Course Graphics – MAS 374 21st Centruy Latinx Literature
Client /Prof: Professor Julie Minich
completion status: Completed
staff guidance: Colin Pittman, Heather Van Ligten
STA team members: Ingrid
description/plans: Design course graphics for MAS 374
To be completed: Monday, January 10

These two courses were pretty similar in scope. Both requested a Style A graphics package, and I finished the main graphics in just over one workday.

I took a bit longer to figure out the formatting for slideshow templates. I actually made a template in PowerPoint, first, before remaking it in Google Slides.

I also learned some After Effects, at least enough to edit simple animated stingers.

Project: Course Graphics – E316M American Literature
Client /Prof: Professor Julie Minich
completion status: Completed
staff guidance: Colin Pittman, Heather Van Ligten
STA team members: Ingrid
description/plans: Design course graphics for E316M
To be completed: Monday, January 10

The second course I worked on concurrently, since many of the graphics were so similar that I reused the same PSD templates.

Unfortunately, this created somewhat of a hassle later, when it came to organizing the files in Box. Sorting all that out took me about as much time as creating the basic graphics in the first place.

As of writing, I’m in the midst of adjusting to remote work. I’ll provide more updates throughout the week, though the other 3 courses are WIPS ranging from near finished to hardly started.

Week XIV

CoLA Refresh Project

CoLA is really quieting down now, with Rahul on break, but I did get to meet the 2 of the 3 new CMSTAs! Ingrid and I are working on developing some plans for weekly CMSTA meetings, and I’m excited to share more details about that once we have any solid ideas, which I definitely do not yet.

Intro Training: Style A&B Course Graphics

Maddy is helping me train up for some design work over the winter break, and one thing I’ll be doing is course graphics. I’m no stranger to Photoshop anymore, but all the online course formatting conventions are pretty LAITS-specific, so this training was very informative. I learned 2 standards for course graphics: Style A, which uses flat colors, and Style B, which uses background images. Picking the palette was fun, and I got to choose the courses, so I did 2 of my recent favorites I’ve taken.

Shortly after finishing, I got assigned a real course to do graphics, which is my very first official design project that’s not a training or CoLA Refresh. Exciting! I’ve basically finished at the time of writing, but I’m waiting for feedback to make some finishing touches, so I’ll be sharing it here once that’s done.

Week XIII

CoLA Refresh Project

In physics, a photon is regarded as having the properties of both a particle and a wave, depending on how it is measured. I’ve noticed that UT departments/majors/programs are similarly fluid in definition, and also subject to the observer effect, as I’ve found many pages for programs that no longer exist after I contact the administrators. Besides that, same as last week.

LAITS location – map illustration for web

This one is pretty much finished. I ended up redoing the palette for higher contrast/visibility, and we’re probably sticking with this one. It also sticks to UT brand palettes more closely, with some flexibility (the “white” is a UT grey with 50% opacity).

Basic Training: Hierarchy in Magazine Spreads

This training I started a while back, but worked intermittently awaiting feedback, so I just wrapped it up this week. The prompt was to design a magazine layout for a short article with 4 images.

InDesign, like Illustrator, is a completely foreign language to me, and similar to illustrator, I think I’ve learned enough to ask where the bathroom is. This training was very useful for providing some basic skills, such as drop caps and multi-page formatting (my previous Ai training was only a 1 page poster). I’m waiting for 1 final round of feedback, and just noticing that I forgot to include any italics (which I believe is its own skillset in Ai), so wish me luck with that.

Web Dev Basics: git and GitHub

Hoping to pick up some shifts over the winter break, I’m working on a few web dev-related trainings Estella assigned me. The first completed was a basic intro to GitHub (and git in general). It involved writing up a readme file in VSCode, then linking it to a GitHub directory. Simple enough, right?

Estella ended up having to help me with almost every individual step. To be fair to myself, half the problems were outdated KB instructions (the UT GitHub has different access perms from when it was written, so I couldn’t really get the places I needed at first) but the other half was me getting hopelessly lost trying to go to the right directory in Terminal. Apparently, in macOS a folder with a space in the name has to be written as backslash-space, not underscore or dash or space or any of the other permutations I tried over and over again. Oops.

But I did get it eventually! Onward to course graphics~

Week XII

CoLA Refresh Project

This week, preparing for Phase 3, we were mostly compiling a list of department contacts in a spreadsheet. Besides some amusing inconsistencies with the list of majors/programs/unknowns, not too much to remark on. Besides that and some unfinished trainings, I did get a design sidequest from Suloni:

LAITS location – map illustration for web

My instructions here were to update the old LAITS location map from the site.

I liked the warm, retro palette of the old design, so I reused it for my first draft (misreading Suloni’s instructions to draft a colorless outline first)

Suloni asked me to redo it with less outlines and a sleeker, flatter modern look, as well as a cooler palette, so as of writing, this is my current draft!

Week XI

This week was busy but uneventful for the Refresh project. Since we’re wrapping up the Dean’s site and entering “phase III,” we had a huge volume of tiny tasks to do, mostly checking and reformatting links, which is very hard to showcase. That said, I did make some headway on trainings.

Basic Training: Iconography

This one was very engaging to me, since I can find Illustrator uniquely… challenging, or at least not very intuitive, so it’s interesting to try and make it work the way I want. The main activity was designing 5 vector icons from a reference style. I chose this one, with black-lined shapes in yellow circles.

My first batch was a little too big, with less padding than the reference.

 

To try and make sure I got it right, I made a new layer lined up with the padding of the references, and pasted it into the other files as a guide.

The second batch seemed to turn out better, but I had to change a lot of proportions for it, as I didn’t want to just “shrink” the whole thing and lose the consistent line thickness.

Basic Training: How to Create Flashcards

This one got its own post below, since it was part of the training. [cue to scroll down]

Not that much to remark on, but it was a good exercise in Photoshop styling. The clip-art sourcing was a new skill, but I’d like to see more requirements/steps/skills etc. for this training, and some applications for the type of flashcard produced.

I also started an InDesign training which was pretty time-consuming but I haven’t finished it, so not til next week’s blog post…

Edit: one last thing I forgot!

Web Dev Hiring Poster

This is not something I was formally assigned to; I asked Maddy about it, got permission to sketch a draft, and got told to put it on hold until more concrete plans were in place. I may have gotten a little carried away, but I did have fun and get some good Photoshop practice in. Here’s how far I got:

Fingers crossed that the retro look isn’t considered too “off-brand.” Yes, it’s kitschy, but hopefully in a way would-be web designers can appreciate.