Week XLIII

This week was a lot of assorted small tasks, workflow optimization, and a casual potluck!

Texas German Dialect Project

Maddy pointed out to me that the image arrangement on my first draft was rather haphazard, with a diagram of her eye flow.

I tweaked the layout and made the images flow in a shape sort of like a tilted ‘7’.

I also learned that some images are too big to be attached in emails, that Outlook tries to make you use its own cloud service that doesn’t work, and that ideally we should send clients a Box link to exports. The more you know!

Intermediate Training: Brochures

After much deliberating and browsing Behance brochures, I started to settle in a specific direction and drafted this:

The idea for monochrome photos came from one Behance example:

But I’m still not sure how to actually design things that look as ‘cutting edge’ as stuff like this. I’ve picked up on smaller details, like papery textures and subdued palettes, but I’m a long way off from anything like that coming naturally.

Week XLII

Back from San Antonio! And I’m still waking up at 5-6 on my own after a week of feeding chickens at sunrise…

Texas German Dialect Project

Most of this week was spend on a first draft for poster numero 3.

The main constraints were a high volume of text, and small image sizes. Some of them I expanded in Photoshop using bicubic smoother, but not before experimenting with an old web tool, http://waifu2x.udp.jp/.

Photo IDs

I actually had some big ambitions for this: swamped by the 7 different Basecamp threads, I wanted to organize all the submissions into one giant spreadsheet, with categorical cells for status and other details.

I was proud of how it turned out, but then I was informed photo IDs are not high priority enough to demand such a time commitment this week. Hopefully the spreadsheet can find more use in the future.

Pages Presentation

This is something I struggled the most with this week. The prompt was essentially to prepare a presentation to pitch the significance of Pages to our new STAs. However, I am extremely bad at marketing and PR.

Suloni and I had a long call about the approach, but my outline is still pretty technical and mundane. I might revise it a bit before the final presentation.

Week XLI

The past few weeks, I’ve been able to spend a good amount of time listening to podcasts at work. I always appreciate the sort of menial work I can chug through without much language processing brainpower for that reason. This week, not so much.

Photo IDs

Photo IDs are one of those things I’m embarrassed it took me so long to really learn, and I am shocked at how logistically complex they are.

See these 5 photo IDs? Guess how many I was assigned (and assessed).

12. 3 had already been uploaded due to a miscommunication, 3 did not meet guidelines, and 1 was missing. That means 7/12, over half, were not available without client comms. And client comms are much more difficult than I thought – many of these are grad students, who I learned the hard way should be reached through an intermediary like an advisor. We have templates for different messages, but I’ve often had to modify them.

This isn’t to complain too much, but I want to say I am impressed that my coworkers like Rachel and Ingrid had worked through presumably dozens (hundreds?) of these over the past year.

 

I worked on some smaller tasks too, but I’m running out of time today, and I’ll be gone next week, so maybe I will append a little more info 2 Mondays from now!

Week XL

Another slow week, assorted small tasks.

STA Bio

I don’t have much to say on this, a self-explanatory fun assignment, but I guess this cements the fact that a grainy noise texture is one of my trademarks now. It just makes everything feel so much more earthy and retro! Like it’s flickering on a vintage monitor or printed on a cheap zine.

HIS 315L – The United States Since 1865

Just a simple text update again, though I spent most of it on a scavenger hunt for the editables. Turns out they were embedded in the Basecamp comments, not any of the Box links also found in the Basecamp comments. Another reminder to please keep your files organized!

Health Transformation Research Institute Statistical Literacy – RAZ

We’re still in the pregame phase, but we’re doing some planning for the powerpoints and some assigned reading:

https://www.brightcarbon.com/blog/presentation-design-principles-better-powerpoint-design/

Notes from the discussion:

• The ways to break up bullet points into grids and dividing lines were most interesting. However, I feel like it will be hard to predict what we can do for RAZ until we know the exact volume and consistency of the slide content.
• Consistency has been an issue in the past – I’ve sunk lots of time into adapting a powerpoint format for one unique slide after another.

And some of Rachel’s:

• Depending on the kind of content Raz wants, we will probably need a style guide. If we make assets in illustrator, we can make a style guide like we did for AFR.
• A lot of clients tend to send a lot of text and want us to fit them into the slide. I’m not sure if this will be the case, but there’s been some issues where the amount of text for a specific slide doesn’t go well with the general powerpoint format. I think flexibility to divide things up into more slides may help with this
• A powerpoint template for various different slides should also probably save a lot of time, but once again sometimes it can still be tedious if specific slides don’t fit the template
• Images are sometimes sent that are not the same aspect ratio but need to be on the same slide – depending on this particular content, we can probably find a work around or ask for a replacement

Intermediate Training: Brochures

So long, InDesign! I’m back to Illustrator for this one. The training itself is very straightforward, with few hints as to the anatomy of a brochure, so I started simple.

However, I found myself wondering what the heck does go on the back of a brochure, and in reading some google results, I decided to try and copy a sleeker format found in one example.

I’m sticking to the futura, and faded palette, but I’m not entirely sure how to balance everything visually. This one will take a lot of fiddling, but it’s a skill I need to get better at.

Week XXXIX

Texas German Dialect Project

Not finalized yet – but getting closer! This time the edits only took about an hour.

ECO 304L Introduction to Macroeconomics

Just another professor name edit. This one had some confusion because I was accidentally directed to the wrong course initially, which was missing some editables, so I spent a while on forensic reconstruction before realizing the mix-up.

Course Design Menu Compendium

This one was fun – Suloni asked for course graphic design menus for a few of our flashier courses, which fortunately I had already made. Except, they weren’t very compact, so I consolidated them into a smaller format (the originals had huge empty spaces where the clients hadn’t requested certain graphics from the template).

Basic Training: Research for Meaningful Brand System

Finally, after several weeks and about 6x the suggested total hours, I’ve done everything I possibly can with my ‘downtime’ training, constructing my own brandbook.

Copying some questions I answered on Basecamp:

• As ornate as parts of might look, I was even more over-ambitious at the start haha. It was a good lesson in streamlining. The wordmark logo is a good example of that. I wanted to make something as snazzy as I could with as few actual moving parts to rearrange as possible.

  Plus, public domain old art is a really good resource! Credit to Wenceslaus Hollar.

• The main technical thing I learned was that image trace is MUCH more economical than a manual pen tool for making vectors in organic shapes. I still have a lot to learn with vectors.
• This was one of the most fun trainings, just open ended enough to allow a lot of creativity but focused enough that I could compare mine to other STAs for reference. I took much longer than prescribed but I made good use of the time.

Week XXXVII

Texas German Dialect Project

Newest draft!

Maddy had suggested scooting the captions into the right column, so the images have much more breathing room now. The images are tweaked to be consistently sized, which means the spacing is slightly inconsistent – it’s an endless battle but sometimes you gotta compromise!

CoLA Web Refresh Support Documentation

I am guilty of getting through these very slowly… A lot of the work is scratching my chin and guessing how to reorganize messy pages like this that were auto-migrated from Cascade.

That’s not too new for me, but it turns out Cascade can’t be accessed anymore! Rest in peace old buddy o7

Since I can’t access the older versions of the sites, progress is a little slow deciphering what order the screenshots were originally in, and between which steps, but I don’t mind some slow work this summer.

Health Transformation Research Institute Statistical Literacy – RAZ

Project: Health Transformation Research Institute Statistical Literacy
Client /Prof: Rebecca A Zarate
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Maddy K, Suloni robertson
STA team members: N/A
description/plans: TBA
To be completed: TBA

Still in the very early stages, but eventually I will be designing a powerpoint for this course. Whether adapting slide content from scripts or reformatting premade slide content is still up in the air. I attended a client meeting to take notes (a first!) but so far, nothing visual to show.

UTFC graphics

More of the same, but I’m learning a lot about Francophile geography and places that look like Wes Anderson stills!