STA Blog

Adrian McKee

Adrian McKee

Week LXXV

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Week LXXV

Biostats logo

Mostly just worked on this this week! One thing I did was make the vector logo an actual transparent vector. The old version had a lot of opaque fills for the overlapping sections.

It took some creative use of the pathfinder tool to slice it up the right way.

Unfortunately the end result isn’t that impressive at a glance because the goal was to make it visually identical to the old version, but trust me that it took a lot of work.

Also, the animation. This went through a lot of iterations, most of which I didn’t export, but here’s the final (?) one.

Week LXXIV

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Week LXXIV

Biostats logo

So shortly after last week’s meeting, Leilani and I drafted several more ideas. Drawing logos in sharpie is very fun.

This was the suite we sent to the clients:

Who liked 1 and 3 the most. So I started drafting 1. It started off a little skinny…

Maddy suggested thickening the dna strands. It was still not very well standardized though.

I ended up redoing all of it on a precise 50 x 50 grid.

Here’s how it looks in white!

Currently working on animation, which will be… interesting!

Week LXXIII

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Week LXXIII

French Textbook

Mostly more of the same here, image tracking and sourcing. No original graphics to share this week. Just a lot of trial and error reverse searching.

TGDP 7

Thanks to Maddy for helping draft this one. Unlike last time, we actually had trouble filling the space!

I experimenting with upsizing and posterizing a very artifacty map. Maddy helped by physically printing it at 300 dpi to see how it really looked (original above).

While it’s slightly grainy at the larger scale, it’s still no less readable than the original, and viewers will likely be at a distance anyways.

Biostats logo

Project: edX MSDS: Biostats v1
Client /Prof: MSDS (?)
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Maddy K
STA team members: Leilani
description/plans: TBA
To be completed: Mid-May

First completely new project in a while, I haven’t written one of those headers in ages. I overheard Maddy discussing a request to design a biostatistics logo and asked about helping. So far, just drafted logos. It seems like Leilani had some of the same ideas via convergent evolution, like the DNA graph.

Week LXXII

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Week LXXII

French Textbook

I think this might be the main thing I worked on all week. Of course, there was a lot of the photo sourcing spreadsheets that were featured on other people’s blogs. But I got to do something else this week – photo editing.

2.4 & 2.5

So, calendars… that’s something that’s hard to come by on stock photo sites. Or at least, most of them look like this:

Not the most readable example for a vocab lesson. The old lesson used screenshots of proprietary calendar softwares, so my job was to make replacements. I started with these 3 photos.

They had a few issues still. The English labeling, mostly, the lack of Saturdays for one, and the branch blocking the other.

For some variants, I actually had to edit the days of the month.

The year calendar was the easiest edit, just using clone stamp. The month names were already in boxes in the PPT file, and the weekday abbreviations from Spanish are the same as French.

This one wasn’t for a specific date, and could have been any calendar photo, but I liked it enough to edit in the proper names and a whole new column from scratch.

5.1

Remember the Beirut slides? I might have covered them on here. Well, a lot came from Wikimedia and need to be replaced. About half. Exactly 12/25 actually, which I know because I made a new tracking sheet just for these city image slides:

It looks like someone’s already added their own tabs to it.

Week LXXI

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Week LXXI

STA Presentation

This rearranged my schedule a lot last week, the presentation itself went great! The only other assets I worked on (Marissa did the lower thirds final versions) was this grid for the intro animation, which I made a standardized template for first.

EDIT: oops, I already covered the grid last week.

 

French Textbook

Finally back on this! There’s been a lot of interesting cases, especially the numbers and calendar-related vocab. For one set of numbers, I was cropping into a scrapbook style.

For another, I got to make some original graphics to match the format of birthday candles.

Week LXX

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Week LXX

A busy week but not much to present here, a lot of it spent on my presentation and rehearsals. I did do 2 graphics, also presentation-related.

STA Presentation

First, I did the layout for these finalist certificates and exported them.

Then, I had a more logistical challenge: fit 25 STA photos into a 5×5 grid template for Bryce to animate in Ae. Did he say that I didn’t need to perfectly standardize it? Yes. Did I anyways? Maybe.

Hey, at least now we have a template of 680x680px squares with 100px margins.