Lately I’ve been working on a great variety of projects, many of which are still in progress. So, today I would like to talk about a relatively simple task I hadn’t done in a while: Photo ID’s.
This week I worked on three of them, all of them were either of a faculty member or a graduate students, which means I made both a 80*90px image edit and a 200*300px profile pic edits for all of them. This is how they came out:
Hi there! This week I got to shadow a meeting a fellow STA had with a client who needed help with Cascade. By this point of my STA career, I of course know the basics of cascade, but I had never personally and individually worked with a client needing Cascade assistance before. So, shadowing someone else leading a meeting like this was an interesting and insightful experience.
Here are some notes I took:
Long time no see! So far we’ve had a great first week returning from Spring Break and are now starting a new refreshing week. Only a few more weeks till the semester ends, so let’s give it our best all, shall we?
One of the biggest projects I was working on before the break was the Concepting and Sketching section of Lesson 7 on Logos. As you might remember from my last post, the purpose of this Lesson creation project is to make a bunch of whole new lessons and tutorial specifically on different topics future STAs will learn from and use as reference when getting to work on these projects. As you can see, this is the lesson 7 out of 9 or 10 that will be part of the new STA curriculum, and Lesson 7 is all about logos.
This specific lesson was divided into thee or four lessons, but I only partook in the creation of one of them with a fellow STA. We both devised a three part plan for this section that went as follows:
Part 1 – Logos 101
In this part we the basics of logos, as in a brief explanation on how they are formed by images, texts and shape, how they not only represent a brand’s image and personality, but also it’s heritage, how they must be timeless and adaptable, finally explaining a bit about the different styles of logos mascots, emblems, and pictorial marks.
Part 2 – Concepting and Sketching
In this part we went through the importance of minimalism, symmetry (and the different kinds of symmetry), and proportions in logo concepting and sketching. We also included a useful list of general logo do’s and don’ts addressing all phases of design like research, acknowledging trends, accounting for responsiveness, etc.
Part 3 – The Activity
This is the part I personally worked on the most. For this part I wrote down a general explanation on the different components of a logo lockup and the vocabulary involved. Then, I created a 9 step tutorial –including examples that I drafted myself– on how to design an original logo lockup: brandmark, work/lettermark, how to add it on different items of merchandise, how to turn it into a favicon, and finally how to add it all into a mockup website. At the end I also provided a helpful list of tips on logo design provided by a fellow STA. These are steps of my personal design:
We are still in need of feedback and are yet to draft the KB for this section of Lesson 7, so stay tuned for updates.
The purpose of this project is to make a whole new lesson and tutorial specifically on color for future STAs to use as reference and learn when they get to work on these projects. As you can see, this is the lesson 5 out of 9 or 10 that will be part of the new STA curriculum.
This specific lesson on color is divided into three content sections: Moods and Meanings of Color, Color as Emphasis, and Color + Type: An Advanced Hierarchy Training. I was in charged of working on the Moods and Meanings of Color section. So I got down to business. I divided this section into three main topics and two activities. The order of which I defined as follows:
Other than that, I also worked on this lesson by writing down a small introduction for it. Oh, and I also wrote the section on Background info that I called History of Color which describes a brief history of Color and Color Theory from Aristotle’s to modern times.
This is still a work in progress, since there are two other sections of the lesson that my peer STAs for this project are working on, but I will make sure to update you when the KB is done and uploaded and, of course, I’ll link it.
For this request I got to work with Thuy, a fellow STA. We were both tasked with coming up with two solutions for the client’s situation. They wanted to change the aesthetic and functionality of two of the pages from their Ethics Project Website.
First they wanted to make this blog page: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/ethicsproject/blog/index.php look like this one: https://knightcenter.utexas.edu/blog/. To solve this issue I was in charge of designing the solution, but we agreed to use the News feature from the COLA web editor to change their blog. This is what I made: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/sta-12/news/index.php.
Second, they wanted to make this resources page: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/ethicsproject/case-studies/index.php look like this https://mediaengagement.org/vertical/media-ethics/. We talked about it and we came up with two solutions, this is the part that Thuy mainly worked on. The first solution we suggested was this one: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/sta-11/flexbox-cards-example.php. We also suggested to use something like the following, in case they lacked the coding experience to carryout Thuy’s solution: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/caaas/faculty/books.php.
A while after we sent the email suggesting the previous solutions, the client contacted us back…
Regarding the Blog page, they said that they liked the aesthetic of our solution, however they did not want to sacrifice the News section to turn it into a blog. So they asked for something different that would still prevail the look and functionality of what we had previously suggested. Thuy and I talked about other ways to tackle this issue. After we figured it out, she came up with this solution: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/sta-11/ethics-blog/index.php. This way, the blog posts are all written into different pages and not saturating a single one, but they are all conveniently collected and teased in a single page.
Now, regarding the Teaching Resources page, the client liked the Flexbox Cards solution, but they don’t have coding experience. So we all kind of came to the understanding that this was not the way to go. For the table solution we suggested they liked that it ddin’t involve much HTML coding, but they were concerned about the aesthetic of it because they did not like that our suggestion had a table with such small cells. As a solution we emphasized that the table is easily editable to whatever the desired size might be and we assured the client that, as long as the pictures were all cropped to the same size, the aesthetic would not be compromised. For such purpose I made the following page as an example of this solution in action: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/sta-12/ethics-project-website-help.php.
We sent out a new email with both of these new additions to our recommended solutions and a detailed step by step guide explaining how to create their own version of our suggestions, concluding part 2 of this request. (If needed I will eventually add a part 3)…
For this request I had to edit a professor’s header from a pdf document in order to update his title, and then turn that into an editable word document that he could use as a template for future uses. So, that’s basically what I did. It took me some time and continuity through communication with the client, but this is the before and after for that request:
