Week XLVII

This was a short week, because I missed 2 days due to a Epstein-Barr virus. Fun! I’m still a little under the weather, but not infectious airborne, so as long as I don’t lick too many people or surfaces around the office I should be fine.

UTFC – Green Screen: 5.5B City Activities List

So, this has been an interesting exercise in subjectivity. It turns out it’s a little difficult to select rights-free, high-quality stock photos of often very specific French vocabulary words that don’t have an English equivalent, and are also in the city of Beirut, Lebanon, which seems to have a dearth of any stock photos. Some of them I simply had to use the more aesthetically pleasing French equivalent. What’s sad is that I love Middle Eastern Architecture, but photogenic stock photo sites are heavily biased towards European cities 🙁

 

Not only that, but from my understanding, Lebanon and Beirut in particular have been handed some unfortunate economics recently. From my brief historical research, Beirut was apparently once referred to as the “Paris of the Middle East” before a civil war a few decades ago, and more recently, a massive industrial accident and subsequent national economic decline. Not a lot of stock photographers heading there lately, I suppose. 343 Unsplash results for “Beirut” and 10,000+ for “Paris.”

Well, the monument photo is still very pretty!

Fall 2022 STA Poster

Technically started this Monday of week XLVIII, but I’ll post a brief update here.

In addition to the complete staff poster, we’re making individual team posters this year, and I’m in charge of Video. Since the overall theme is European Soccer, the idea is for the poster to kinda look like this.

All I’ve done so far is cut out the ‘action pose’ photos for the video team, but the stack of layers does look like some kind of quirky collage already. Maybe I’ll just use this.

Week XLVI

Yes, I am officially acknowledging I skipped a week, since we had an orientation in place of the meeting, and were given semiofficial permission. Anyhow, it’s been a slow bunch of little tasks, as usual lately.

Texas German Dialect Project

Back on this with a new draft. Font size has been made smaller (smallified) for some breathing room. Nothing radical, but steady progress. I forget which month this was supposed to be finished in.

Intermediate Turkish – transferring content from OCILL

This one was interesting. Mariannne recruited me to help fix some broken MP3 files in Canvas. I’ve never touched Canvas editing before, but it was simple enough, just using inspect element to track down the missing file name and a built-in editor to re-attach it.

Photo IDs

This week has been more of the same, but with a big update – Andre the API is being retired! That means no more manually editing and uploading photos! I got to test out a new interface which the faculty/students will be using from now on to upload their profile pictures more like a Facebook photo, with a built-in crop tool, rather than creating busywork for us STAs.

It’s much more efficient, and I’ve wondered why something like this wasn’t done years ago, but it’s a little sad too – I’ll miss the tedium of Photo IDs! Well, maybe not tracking down all the missing ones.

Intermediate Training: UI/UX with Figma

I’ve finally gotten to the point where I have my first page mostly-sort-of-kinda-constructed-ish in Figma. Here’s the draft drawing and the mockup side-by-side.

My workload is lightened with the Photo IDs wrapped up (forever…) so this is a good training to sink some time into while I wait for new projects to pick up steam. Figma has a LOT of room for trial-and-error learning.

Week XLVI

I spent most of this week stuck at home. Boo! I’m lucky I had the sort of straightforward, simple work to do with my limited editing capacity at home, but it doesn’t make for very flashy blog posts.

Photo IDs

The bulk of my time this week. You saw the spreadsheet last week. My main addition, besides a few dozen entries, was a dropdown on the Grad Students page for the department + sender contact, since searching that every time was getting tedious. Doing some Workflow Optimization.

Texas German Dialect Project

Remember this? I got instructions for a new layout, which essentially entailed redoing all of it. The newest draft:

Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten quite a bit of how InDesign works in the meantime, and did not realize until the time of writing how much of the text I cut off! Today, I’m going to get Maddy’s help with some typesetting and spacing. Oops.

Week XLV

Weird week – I get back from vacation, and a couple days later I’m knocked out with a 100 degree fever!

I did a lot of little stuff this week, so I’ll cover 2 things quick.

Course Graphics – ADV 319 Psychology of Advertising

More like course graphic!

They just requested one custom button for the home page. I may have copied Hess Trucks slightly.

Photo IDs

Suloni and I talked this week about reorganizing the input workflow for photo IDs. The process we wrote out:

1. Client uses Online Photo ID Submission Form to submit a digital photo
2. 3 Managers receive ID submission in Outlook email
3. 1 Manager copies the “Print” version of the Outlook email to paste into the appropriate BCto-do comment in the appropriate group FACULTY or  STAFF or GSTD
4. Manager, adds data from BCcomment, to our SpreadSheet
5. Manager rocket-boosts each BCcomment with “SS” to denote which data is added to our SpreadSheet.
6. Manager: investigate each submission to see if it is indeed in Box
7. Manager: if photo not in Box, note in the SpreadSheet + add the e-mail contact. (graduate advisor is the e-mail contact, if grad student submission is not in box)
8. Manager: e-mail sender or advisor for new submission
9. Manager: Create and assign 1 BCto-do under “STA Assignments” group

The thing I’m most proud of, a new spreadsheet! Yay! At Suloni’s suggestion, simplified from my older experiment for more streamlined intake. Compare:

Week XLIV

Whew! A lot of little tasks this week.

Course Graphics – EEV Computational Biology

Still working on the stinger slides for this.

Maddy showed me how to access the actual depository we have of nice, high res UT photos, so I started with something sciencey.

The client wanted something more UT-y, and later requested something similar in color to the backdrop. This is where I ended up after a few iterations.

Still awaiting feedback – and after today, I’ll be gone for a week, so I might need to share my editables before signing off.

Intermediate Training: Brochures

Finally had time to get back to this, and pretty much wrapped it up.

Some of the spacing could… be improved. I’ll wait for direct feedback on finishing touches.

Asset updates – COM301E & PSY352P

I’ve been doing a lot of these, and sometimes I don’t log them on my blog, but this week I learned a new skill from Maddy – using the timeline in Photoshop to export animated files!

I also updated another one that I did not learn any new skills from, nor can I take credit for how pretty it looks, but I might as well put it on my blog.

Intermediate Training: UI/UX with Figma

This is another very open-ended training I’m excited for. It teeeeechnically has a 3-4 hour suggested timeframe, but I’m really being a perfectionist and deep-diving because it involves a lot of new skills.

So far, I’m just in the stage of drafting a fictional florist website (as a “wireframe” drawing) and learning to use Figma.

I’m still working on the basic Figma tutorials. Honestly, they’re not well designed… limited interaction, a lot of text, and weirdly enough, a lot of the instructions are out of date? It references panels and tools with different names and placements, so it’s a lot more self-teaching than it’s meant to be. Oh well.

 

Week XLIV

Another slow week of many small tasks.

Course Graphics – EEV Computational Biology

This was a rush job to be done before Thursday morning. Really the only urgent thing was the studio backdrop, since Thursday was filming.

The studio wanted a muted blue collage similar to another course.

The images selection itself was a little limited (a lot of computer code and graphs) so this was my very first draft.

I searched for some more  sciencey images on my own (thanks, Wikmedia Commons) and smudged them on top similar to the French textbook collages, at Maddy’s suggestion.

However I wanted to try a properly layered collage, and redid it all from scratch.

Then, I lightened it a bit and removed the watermark (as requested).

I’m pretty happy with how it came out! I haven’t seen my final draft in the studio but this is how tests looked for some midway drafts.

Photo IDs

I haven’t been logging these on my blog weekly, but since this week is slow, I’ll post a few batches.

Of 9 assigned, only 2 had hiccups! There are 8 here because one of the hiccups was the same person being assigned twice. That’s much better than the 50+% rate of unusable submissions a few weeks ago.