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Cristina Villarreal Núñez

Cristina Villarreal Núñez

ECO 304K: Studio Course Graphics

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ECO 304K: Studio Course Graphics

Hi blog! Long time no see… I had a brief hiatus last week, but I’m back and for the first time ever working in-person at the office. So that’s exciting! Anyway, let me talk about this project that I was working on before my vacation week.

 

So, ECO 304K is an Intro to Microeconomics at the College of Liberal Arts, and recently they requested some Canvas and Studio course graphics for this upcoming Fall semester. I can bore you with the details of all the stuff they asked for, but I really just want to talk about two of the requests, which were also some the ones I focused on before handing the project over to another STA. (I say some because I technically also worked on the buttons and desk skirt, but those aren’t as fun to talk about).

 

First, I worked on the stingers. Some of the ones they asked for were from our usual stinger supply. However there were four more custom stingers that they requested: a Kahoot stinger, a Demonstration stinger, an Alumni Interview stinger, and a Q&A stinger. I worked on a lot of different versions for these and thankfully got great feedback from a fellow STA. Here are their final results:

 

 

The other thing I mostly worked on was the digital backdrop. The challenge for this one was to, first off, find a free-for-use image (or one licensed by us) that depicted a Rube Goldberg Machine, and then add a piggy bank to it, whilst also editing it to fit the chosen color scheme for the course… That being said, the following three are (first) the original image and (the following two) my best efforts to edit the image:

 

 

This is the final design by the STA that followed up with this project. I think they did a great job! So, shout out to Poonum (we will miss you)!

 

TBH: Rusk County Map

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TBH: Rusk County Map: Canvasser Interactive

This is a project for which I’m tasked to develop a Canvasser Interactive for a new Texas Beyond History activity called Rusk County Map. The point of this new map-based interactive page is to have a historic black and white map of the Rusk County area upon which are colored/highlighted place names and features (e.g. a river). Those colored/highlighted spaces are meant to be hot/link spots so that, when clicked, a short separate page (housed in …/rusk/images/ folder) would open with a few paragraph description and maybe a few embedded images. Sort of like what the Explore the Sites page on the Cairn Burials special exhibit is doing: http://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/cairn/explore.html

 

My main task here is to program the interactions on the map using Canvasser. This should be a challenging yet interesting project considering I have not worked on Canvasser since I did the basic training for it back in November 2020. But I do have some fellow STA’s to help me out as a support team, so that’s good.

 

As of right now we are still waiting for the client to send over the assets we’ll need to start, but for now I’ll leave you with some of the questions I have already prepared for them:

 

  • What dimensions will the Canvasser Interactive have?
    • w = 956 px
    • h =  ??? px
  • Will I work on the design elements of this project as well or just putting together the Canvasser Interactive?
    • Creating buttons/pop-ups?
    • Colorizing the map?
    • If so, please specify the deliverables.
  • Interactive features are required?
    • i.e. buttons, toggle elements, click and drag objects, pop-ups, conditional pop-ups, text entry boxes…
  • After the user clicks in the hot/link spots, will the descriptive paragraphs/embedded images pop up within the Canvasser Interactive space or on new tabs/windows like on the Cairn Burials ‘Explore the Sites’ example provided?

GRG 401C: Studio Course Graphics

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GRG 401C: Studio Course Graphics

In brief, this will be a recap of the course graphics I worked on for this class. I didn’t have to do the whole process of designing these, but I took over what Miguel left off and resized the image for all of the assets, corrected some minor spelling mistakes, and redid the design menu.

 

Draft Web Service Page In Cascade

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Draft Web Service Page In Cascade

So, this is a project left behind by a recently graduated STA. The project was meant to be a Cascade page draft that would advertise the web development services offered at LAITS. The original requirements of which, went as follows:

 

– 4 buttons on the page (wp drupal grav grapes) that link to the appropriate help e-mail
– A write-up too about each CMS? pictures of sites using these CMSs
– Types of services( tech support for existing sites, or does the client need a new site… designed… etc)
– A banner
– More…

 

Some of these requests have been recently scrapped, and some of the other ones were worked out by the previous STA working on this project. The the following mock-up page for reference.

 

However, this Tuesday I had a meeting with Suloni on ways to improve upon the current banner, like reducing the height, looking for more/brighter colors, and considering that the computer motif has been a bit overplayed in the web development/technology scene.

So, here are four different banner ideas I have designed for this purpose:

 

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

Option 4

 

Reasoning Behind Each Option:

  1. For the first one I wanted to maintain the idea of “web development” so I added some color and minimal computer imagery, though I thought the browser appearance would look nice and tighten the blank space.
  2. For this option I wanted to focus on the concept of “help,” which is an important task for the web development services page. I was inspired by The Beatles’ Help album.
  3. Next, for this option I wanted to play off the concept of “web development” with a spider theme. [Note: the spider image I used is not free for use, so if we were to proceed with this path I would draw a different spider.]
  4. Finally, I also made this genie related banner based on the comment/idea Suloni shared during our meeting on Tuesday.

 

Also, within the process of trial and error, I made a really cute face for the spider that I did not end up using, but I think it’s cute. So, if you sticked around for this long, here, have a friendly cartoon face for free.

Trip Recap and LAITS Web Support

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Trip Recap and LAITS Web Support

Hi there! Long time no see. Last week I didn’t get to blog because I only worked two out of the five days I usually work. I had to take some time off to go to the doctor, and to take a small trip to Mexico City. Nothing too exciting though, it was a day in/day out kind of trip because the point of it was just to go get some paperwork. But, I did get to see some cool stuff before we had to be at the airport.

 

Anyway, this week I’ve been working on a lot of different stuff. Some of which were the two small LAITS Web Support requests I tackled this week.

 

First, was a request from working on the web design for the Black Studies Department page asking me to resize their logo to a smaller scale, similar to the Liberal Arts logo since it was too big for the page and looked off. So, I did! I had to find the Liberal Arts logo they were talking about, since the reference image provided was a screenshot, and couldn’t give me info about the actual size of the logo. Once I found it, I downloaded it, looked for the dimensions, and copied specifically the height (because its width was slightly disproportional compared to the Black Studies logo), and took that info to then resize the Black Studies logo. Once I was done, I renamed the document to spare the client of confusion, and sent the final email.

 

Finally, a professor asked if by chance LAITS might still have the original image she submitted with her last profile page image upload request, so I was in charge of finding her image if we still had it… which we did. Woowoo! So, once I responded to the client’s request.

 

OCILL Update Pt.2

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OCILL Update Pt.2

Howdy friends, and welcome to the OCILL Update Pt.2: Electric Boogaloo.

 

But before I start talking about OCILL, I would like to dedicate this post to my 200th day of work as an STA! Wuwuwuwu! (ﾉ＾▽＾)ﾉ☆ﾟ. * ･ ｡ﾟI have ‘earned so much from my time here, and I couldn’t have hoped for a better first job to have.

 

Now, let’s talk about OCILL… This week we started working on the second part of the Turkish Course we’ve been transferring to Canvas: “Intensive Turkish II OCILL Transfer.” We had a brief pause on it at the end of last week as we finished the first part of the course transfer, and got our work approved. But now we are back and better than ever. However, I did notice that we were missing some of the content that we need to include in each of the activities. But I guess that’s something that will be fixed soon. For now, we just have to work on it, however we can, and hope the professor adds the rest of the info soon.