STA Blog

Adrian McKee

Adrian McKee

Week LXIX

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Week LXIX

STA Awards Presentation

This has definitely been the majority of my actual time this week. I have a powerpoint mostly finished, and I’m going to practice presenting it shortly after writing this. I’m not really sure it’s worth spoiling on this blog, though. It will be presented soon enough, and I can upload more pictures of the process after that maybe?

STA Award Finalist announcement

Maddy constructed all the elements for this, and just asked my help arranging them. We settled on this layout of Name -> Finalist -> Logo.

Ethics and Fairness in AI (Ken Fleischmann)

Yay, I got to research graphics for an interesting course! We got the request to update a studio backdrop:

Hello, we need to make a couple small updates to the backdrop. Could we replace the images that have been circled in red? We hope to replace the photos with things that focus more on how AI can help and less on the computer/brain aspect.

The question of how AI can help people has evolved rapidly in the time since these graphics were made. I’m personally a big fan of AI art and text generation. My first thought was to use some of my favorite Dall-E 2 art examples from the wiki page.

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I was having a hard time finding good screenshots of ChatGPT’s utility, so I took a section of one of my own chats, where I asked it to write code in Java.

I also included a stock photo of radiology, something AI is used for. This was my first draft:

The client actually wanted something more serious and focused on other aspects like agriculture and self-driving cars. I replaced the AI art with another Dall-E of a robot, and the inside of a self-driving car, as well as standardizing the line thickness and brightening up the entire image somewhat.

Still in studio testing/finalizing stages as of writing.

Week LXVIII

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Week LXVIII

A few things this week. One of them I actually got to design from scratch!

TGDP 6

Several rounds of edits which consisted of a lot of tiny line edits. For the last one, I finally got around to a background. My first idea was a more intricate escher-y pattern, but I think simple works best here.

STA Presentation – Lower Thirds

Yay! A design project for me, and I got to use grainy textures?

Unsplash has a good paper texture, which I trimmed the edges of as a test. I also used it for the tape, cropping and darkening it.

Maddy suggested clear scotch tape, and maybe some kind of Roboto if we want to mix fonts with the handwritten one.

Then, I got the suggestion “Something now is feeling pirate map-y and we want to feel more school notebook-y.”

 

I cropped several variants in case we need to mix it up. Here, below, is a mockup of it with a shadow effect.

That was the most fun design thing I’ve gotten to do in a while. Sadly, it only lasted a couple days.

STA Presentation – GSD Posters

So, it turns out I’ve been chosen to present! I don’t have much to show off visually yet. The powerpoints have a template, and I’ve just started sketching an outline. Soon, I’ll have… something to show. It will be an interesting narrative, because the GSD posters were more of a logistical than a design task – we had a template, and most of the actual work was photo sourcing, but it was an art to coordinate all of it I suppose.

Weeks LXVI-LXVII

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Weeks LXVI-LXVII

Am I supposed to write these during break?

GSD Course Posters

Not much to say about the screen ads. Maddy made the template, and they turned out good.

We did get one last poster request for a forgotten course. I had fun finding the image, and scaling it up. Never underestimate posterize tool.

TGDP 6

This one was a whole lot of text. It ran well off the page when I first started pasting it in at the previous font size, so it took a lot of experimentation to get a very first draft that didn’t have the best hierarchy.

Maddy provided a better layout, split into sections, for me to standardize and fine-tune. Still snug, but working better. We are now in stage 2, various text corrections.

Vector logo recreation

Would it surprise you to learn that some very old intricate vector graphics were not backed up in Box and all we have are the exports? :’) I even combed the folders despite Maddy having already done so, and couldn’t find anything. Oh well, a good opportunity to relearn the pen tool. I’ve been tracing these in red, so they look kind of like evil sigils.

So far, 12.5 / 16 done.

Week LXV

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Week LXV

For the first time ever, I forgot to update my blog last week! That’s how busy I’ve been!

GSD Course Posters

I had just about wrapped these up by the time of the meeting last week. I ended up completing around half of them myself.

After we compiled all the pdfs into one folder, I edited the instructor names and course times onto them. It was a good test of adobe acrobat’s pdf editing capabilities. Editing text is very straightforward, and images can be edited too, though replacing them might be harder for collages. The idea is that professors and faculty can edit their own promotional materials for future semesters.

We have 5 courses to modify into screen ads, but Maddy is working on a template for that.

UTFC

So, I don’t have as many fun pictures for this, because the most time has been put into unraveling the logistical issues behind the pictures. It turns out, we may need to redo somewhere between 2,000 and 17,000 images due to copyright conflicts. That will be some fun logistics. I did learn a lot about creative commons licenses in the meantime!

Week LXIII

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Week LXIII

Faculty Search Committee PPT Redesign

Remember this? Well, I finally got something to actually do for it. Lorena gets all the credit for the template Ai files, but I did fill in about 6 of these graphs. The hardest part was the differing scales, but Maddy helped me with that.

EDIT: THE GRAPHS FEATURED CONTAINED PRIVATE FERPA DATA AND HAVE BEEN REDACTED.

 

GSD Course Posters

Project: Faculty Search Committee PPT Redesign
Client /Prof: Raquelle Brant
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Maddy K
STA team members: Lorena, Marissa, Leilani, Luisa, Carrie
description/plans: Designing posters for the German department, some new and some updated. Maddy created a template.
To be completed: Feb 24th

Woohoo, this is my first big logistical/project management task in a while, maybe since photo IDs? When was the last time I got to make a big spreadsheet? Long enough ago that they changed the formatting in google sheets for dropdown options, it’s automatic now instead of having to write it in some hidden data options tab.

As you can see, there’s 26 posters the GSD department would like created. Because of that, the design flairs we played with last time would not be very time efficient (we have about a week to get this done) so Maddy created a great template. For an example, here’s the template + an old version:

And my updated version:

We’re aiming to spend about 30 mins each on these, and around half of them are already assigned/WIP, so I think we’ll make good time.

Week LXII

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Week LXII

Yup, I’m center-aligning headers and embeds now.

TGDP Banner 5

A lot of progress here. This is actually the third official draft, just sent out yesterday, after grueling trial and error. Maddy suggested editing the county map, and moving the website blurb to one corner.

Note to self: always check for the plus signs of cut-off text in InDesign. I somehow miss 1 or 2 every draft.

Intermediate Training: Animate Simple Course Graphics

Remember this? Well, now I know what keyframes are!

Honestly, the technical side of Ae is smoother than I expected (at least the basics). What’s really tricky is actual composition. Animation is a really intricate science, and my first draft definitely doesn’t feel ‘right’ in terms of pacing and framing. I talked to Maddy about a blog post I saw which had some storyboarding tips from the Adventure Time artists.

It doesn’t help that I barely storyboarded this one, kinda just figuring out in Ae from the raw materials. I’d be very interested in playing with this kind of thing more and getting the hang of making stuff that feels smooth and balanced.