Last Day as an STA

Today is my last day as an STA, which is completely surreal! I’ve been an STA at LAITS for most of the last two years (!), and it’s crazy.that it’s coming to an end now. I’m so grateful to have had this job as an undergrad, and to Suloni, Valerie, and Maddy for creating such a supportive and creatively challenging environment, especially during these difficult Covid times. I’ve learned and grown so much over the course of this job, both in terms of improving my technical skills (I can animate things now!) and working collaboratively in groups. I’ve gotten to work on so many interesting projects (studio course graphics, Vlabs, career infographics) which have pushed me but also made me so much more confident as a designer. It’s been an incredible experience just to be around so many talented people and learn from/be inspired by all of y’all, so thank you all so much 🙂

 

via GIPHY

Chatter Logos

This week I worked on creating vector logos for Chatter from the drafts I sketched out last week. Here’s what I came up with (the last 3 are the most recent; I think the one with cursive font is my favorite)

 

More LRC Mockups

LRC Mockups

This week I made some more small tweaks (adding titles, filler text) to the 2 LRC mockups so they can be shown to the clients for more feedback. For the purposes of their grant proposal, all they need is a static mockup, so this is just a rough idea of what the site could look like (if it gets built).

The first image shows the dictionary tab toggled, where a user can search for specific words (in this case the words are from the Yucatec language) and then see a basic definition, the etymology, semantic categories, and related languages. The second image shows the semantic tab toggled, which lets you see all of the etyma that fall under a specific category (like dishes).

Here are potential colors I came up with, which I pulled from 1) their current site and 2) the last mockup I did for them, where I used this soft green color as an overlay on top of Mayan hieroglyphics. The UT burnt orange as an accent

 

 

Chatter Logo Ideas

 

 

Mockups for the LRC

This week I got a new assignment to mock up some web pages for a future site called “Mesoamerican Lexicon” for the LRC (Linguistics Research Center). I’ve previously done some other page mockups for them, so this is similar to what I did before. I’m using Adobe XD to create the mockups, and even though I’m new to the program it seems to be going pretty well. Here are some of my initial drafts, trying out some different colors:

Other than this main assignment, this week I met with Ingrid to go over the main Cascade tasks (setting up new sites, answering web support requests, etc.). I tried to compile some links and notes so it would all be in one place and easy to reference in the future (hopefully). I’m also working on a new basic training to create an infographic using a combination of Illustrator and InDesign (I’ll post some screenshots here once I make some more progress on it!)

Basic Training: InDesign

This is my first time using InDesign, so it’ll be interesting to explore this program and get familiar the process of creating magazine spreads and other types of layouts. So far the program has been pretty intuitive, and I think it’s one of those things that will be super useful to have some experience with in case I ever need to make a flyer, brochure, etc.

For this training all of the content was given to us, and so the assignment was to arrange in an aesthetic way, create different text styles for the header, paragraph content, captions, etc. I decided to make the first page more of a focal page and keep the rest more minimalist. I used accent colors (pink, dark blue, pale blue) by pulling colors directly from the feature image, which is always a good way to tie in color.

After Effects

I also tinkered a little bit more with my animation to get the letters to slide in faster, because initially there were too slow I think.

Basic Training: After Effects (Continued)

This week I made some progress on animating my banner in After Effects. I took awhile to get the assets for it ready, but the animation was pretty straightforward once I dropped in my PSD. I didn’t end up using a lot of effects besides fading in/out each background color. For the rest of the images I just offset them so they would drop in one at a time. There are a lot more effects that I still haven’t tried out (it seems like there’s an endless number of possible effects), but I’m pretty happy with how my first animation came out!

 

Pixel Art Tutorial

Here is the published pixel art tutorial! It’s ready to go for other STAs to start testing it out. I think it should be a good primer on Ai tools like the grid tools and the live paint bucket (if people haven’t used them before), so I’m hoping people find it helpful and applicable to other projects.