Week XXXVII

I have 3 tasks this week, in descending priority from 1-3

Texas German Dialect Project

Finally got some client feedback, and spent a whole day grappling with the difficulty of sizing and spacing elements consistently in InDesign. My first attempt had all the images at a consistent size that worked for the smallest text boxes, but left a lot of awkward space.

After that, I decided to line image up with the top and bottom of each text box, making them vary with the length of each text (which is still eyeballed, since the box size is adjusted manually, but the spacing between boxes is automated).

The result is sort of better, except that first thing next week, I need to almost all of it to adjust for a header mistake, and split step 8 into a header and subheaders, as well as maybe making the titles and image captions separate text boxes, so I can readjust the image sizes to the top margins of the header text boxes and the bottom of the caption text boxes, and then reset the image border width to 2 since that changes upon resize, and then fine tune the alignment again since changing the border width alters that. Whew!

Priority level: 1

Basic Training: Research for Meaningful Brand System

As mentioned, I’ve been taking my time with this, and making the graphics as fancy as possible. The booklet is heavily derived from a 17th century Bohemian woodcut; I used content-aware fill to make a blank version of the paper background for some pages and kept a low-opacity version of the illustration for others.

I estimate it’ll be done the next full shift I work on it.

Priority level: 3

CoLA Web Refresh Support Documentation

Another small task I picked up, this took longer than expected, because I am writing the documentation from scratch, and am quite rusty on a lot of Refresh features. I have only written up 1 page so far.

I will be doing more testing/research and writing more next week.

Priority level: 2

Week XXXVI

Texas German Dialect Project

My (final) first draft of this scrapped the vertical guides and evenly spaced everything. As of writing, I am still waiting for client feedback.

Basic Training: Research for Meaningful Brand Systems

This is an older training I’d finished the first part of months ago. The second part involves making a brand booklet for a fictional cafe with the following info:

• Name: Fairy Forest Cafe
• Mission Statement: Our mission is to inspire wonder and magic in the day-to-day. We are a 24-hour cafe welcome to all those who wish to enjoy a warm beverage, mingle, study, read, or just sit and enjoy the ambiance.
• 3-5 Adjectives: whimsical, natural, cozy, fresh, relaxed
• Messaging: Magical
• Audience: in an urban environment, typically serves students and young twenty/thirty somethings who are looking to get a good read on, do work, and perhaps mingle with fellow coffee goers in a casual manner. These twenty to thirty somethings love organization, “quirky” things, and consuming caffeinated products.
• Type of Restaurant: coffee, desserts, refreshments, and some light food (think sandwiches and soups). Like halfway between Bennu and this cafe (El Bosc de les Fades)

The booklet itself is to include a moodboard, logo, color scheme, typography guide, and merchandise.

I started with the logo, to work outwards from its colors/design elements. I’ve been taking my time with this training, since it’s been a slow week, and it’s a good opportunity to self-teach Illustrator and Indesign; I need a lot of refreshing for both. I wanted to incorporate moth/butterfly wings into the logo, so my first idea was to try tracing a photo as a raster, then vectorizing it.

 

…I wasn’t very satisfied with my mouse drawing, so I tried tracing vector shapes directly over an illustration.

…and was even less satisfied. (The image is a public domain woodcut from Wikimedia). 

I tried directly vectorizing it next and actually made it work pretty well, so I used that for this logo with a mint-chocolate palette.

The colors were sampled from some of my moodboard pictures, old growth forest photos and John Bauer paintings.

I’ve started drafting the actual stylebook, but it’s pretty plain so far. I plan to look at some references on Behance, and rework some things like the typography and my old InDesign nemesis, guidelines.

Chemistry Readiness Course

This was a quick exercise in independent problem-solving: a somewhat ambiguous design task assigned minutes before the managers left for a 1 hour break, and 1 hour before my shift ended, due by the day’s end. The source photo was low res, so I made several blurred versions blown up to the right proportions for a studio backdrop, and since I couldn’t upload into the requested Volume server, I left the editables in an accessible Box drive.

CE 333T Engineering Communication

Another quick design task, this one was just updating the professor for 2 Canvas graphics, and it came with its own moral too – always save your editables! After some sleuthing I deduced I would have to remake them from scratch. Thankfully that doesn’t take long for Style A graphics.

Week XXXV

Scheduling has been weird but finals are done – sorry about the inconsistency!

I’ve noticed that mentally organizing these and going through my old basecamp posts to collect the screenshots and remember everything I’ve done takes much longer than actually writing them. Perhaps I should start saving bullet point notes and screenshots into a folder as I go through projects to make blog updates more streamlined.

CoLA Web Refresh

This last stretch was a lot of smaller sites. I felt really smart organizing my unit notes spreadsheet into alternating colors blocks for each department, until I realized just today that someone had made tabs for the different departments at the bottom. Isn’t the human brain amazing!

As much of a pain as it was for me to update 20+ years of newsletter archives for some dusty old sites, I’m glad they’re accessible; someday I’d like to go through and read them just for curiosity’s sake.

Japan Lab

With a few variations in color and file format, these are the final logos.

Nice and simple, even though my pixel fujisama was sadly unused, this was a fun project and it’s the first time seeing a logo I designed on a website.

Texas German Dialect Project

Project: Retractable Banner for “The TGDP Process”
Client /Prof: TGDP (Margaret Blevins & Hans Boas)
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Maddy K
STA team members: N/A
description/plans: Texas German Dialect Project has been working with us since 2019 to develop a series of banners. All together the banners will act as an interactive “museum” one can walk through & learn about TGDP’s research. This will be the second banner in the series! Our goal is to be making about 1 banner per month throughout the summer.
To be completed: June

So this is my first time using InDesign in a while. It’s also the largest file size in inches (6.5 feet) I’ve ever worked with. As much as I’ve complained about vectors I can definitely see the importance here (flushed emoji).

A lot of the brainpower here went into trying to determine the number of horizontal guides for 10 text boxes, 3 of which were roughly twice as long as the others, so I guess that would suggest 13 rows, but that’s not accounting for space at the top and bottom, nor the image spacing.

My very rough first draft right now has 3 columns and 36 rows (I know), but I might play more with spacing.

Maybe getting more comfortable with InDesign can be my summer goal, since outside of work I’d like to do more writing/publication creative stuff anyways.

HIS 315K The United States, 1492-1865

Just a quick faculty update to some older course graphics – props to some departed STAs I didn’t get to meet for this nice color scheme!

Week XXXIII

Japan Lab

We’ve narrowed down the font and logo, so I’m playing with colors and arrangements this week.

The round logo was harder than I thought it would be… Illustrator’s “text on path” tool is not very friendly. I am waiting to hear back if the lowercase subtitle seems too casual.

Course graphics: Masterworks of American Literature

This week I made the set of buttons for this course. I am also experimenting with a new method of summarizing a lot of little course graphics files: finder screenshots. What do we think, too lazy? Should I get back to doing design menus again?

Course graphics: Global Governance

Just updated the buttons and banner for this one, as well as making a new stinger animation. You can see I’ve sneakily started exporting everything as pngs.

CoLA Web Refresh

At long last, I finished the Asian Studies and related sites. The South Asian institute was much bigger than expected – part of this was a log of conferences going back to 2006. But updating the Sanskrit pages did inspire me to check out John Keay’s India – A History since I am too lazy to find a translation of the Vedas or anything.

Week XXXII

I think these numberings are turning into a fencepost problem since I’m writing midweek anyways, but I want to stick with the roman numerals.

Japan Lab

Project: Japan Lab logo design
Client /Prof: Adam Clulow
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Suloni Robertson
STA team members: N/A
description/plans: Refine existing logos for the Japan Lab site
To be completed: Mon, Apr 25

This project has a hard cap of 15 hours, so it’s been an exercise in workflow and client communication to get everything done efficiently. The gist is to refine a logo for Japan Lab, a UT project for developing computer games based on Japanese history. It’s gone in a lot of different directions so far.

I started by, at Suloni’s suggestion, choosing the 3 frontrunners from a long design document of logo drafts, and incorporating a vectorized Godzilla shape the client was hoping to see, as well as mocking up how they look in the site.

 

 

The client then expressed interest in my own ideas, so with time constraints in mind, I drafted a simplified vector.

(I say simplified, but I just want to show off how stupidly complex I made this vector, because I don’t know how to draw just the white outline)

The client then reminded me that the project is computer game-related, which I hadn’t thought about because I didn’t really read the site, so I drafted a pixelated fujiyama. This one was my personal favorite design so far.

As of writing, we’ve left off with ~30 variants for the client to choose from (with multiple fonts and new graphics such as a pixelated Japan shape) so I am waiting for those to be narrowed down.

Advanced Training: Create Pixel Art in Illustrator

Suloni suggested this because of the above project. It’s straightforward enough, so of course I had to make it more complicated for myself and choose a difficult image, an animation still from Castle of Cagliostro.

The shapes were difficult to get right, but I was happy with how the colors and overall composition came out.

Out of sheer curiosity, I tried simply shrinking the image and indexing the same number of colors, to see how my work compared to the computer’s, and then overlaid them in a GIF.

The computer’s was definitely bumpier, albeit more accurate shapewise. I’ve done a lot of pixel art, but often by shrinking the reference first and then cleaning up the shape. This training was very useful for learning an entirely different approach that I ended up using for one of the logos not long after. Thanks Suloni!

CoLA Refresh

We’ve been cleaning up a lot of auto-migrated sites both small and large, and while it’s too much to summarize everything, I want to show one example of the type of philosophical issue I run into.

On a long page like this, with anchor links at the top (a feature not supported in Pages) our rule of thumb is to translate the sections into accordions or tabs. Makes sense, right? Shortens the page, makes it more navigable at a glance. Well…

It seems as if each of these categories had several subcategories. Ranging from 1 or 2,

To… however many this is.

So an accordion would look like: 2 sentences, 2 sentences, 1 sentence, 2 sentences, several pages of info, 2 sentences.

And then you get into the question of, what are these categories anyways? What is the hierarchy supposed to be here? Is Specific Interests/Requirements noteworthy enough to deserve its own formatting separate from every other section of the page? How much does consistency matter?

Cascade layouts do not make it easy. For now, I’ve been noting a lot of these long pages and leaving them on the back burner.

Week XXXI

I’ll be brief!

Norwegian Poster

The client preferred the my draft with the northern lights and embroidered banner, so I reformatted that for the new templates Suloni gave, in 3 sizes + a digitial banner ad. Let me tell you, Illustrator is not a program that likes to help you crop photos and tile them nicely, but I made it work eventually.

I actually saw these in person, printed out at the World Language Fair near speedway! I’ll admit, my bold color choices looked a little off, printed out. The dark-on-light posters fared much better. But still exciting! I walked up to someone and was like, hey I made that poster! I also won a bracelet in a game of Turkish trivia because I knew what the Bosporus Strait is.

Course graphics: Physics

Just wrapped this up with some Canvas buttons.

UTFC graphics

Sort of getting in the hang of these? I made a collage this time, since WordPress didn’t like my image sizes last time. These were Monaco (top) and Avignon (bottom).

There was also an alt version of each for a Picture-in-Picture background, with slightly less blue tones, but I am too lazy to collage 16 of these.

Edit: I accidentally uploaded a collage of the wrong city the first time, the backgrounds for Marseille done by someone else. Goes to show how good my french geography is.

Course graphics: Masterworks of American Literature

This one was a plain Style A, so it didn’t take very long, but a good refresher. No relation to my previous E316M course.

The only thing I had to do off-model was adjust the text size/placement for no portrait photo, so the button text is a little bigger.