FTT – Portfolio Tips

Hi y’all! I recently noticed that I am just a few days away from my 200th day of work! So definitively tune in because next post, will be dedicated to that…

Moving on, today I wanted to talk about the portfolio tips Maddy and Valerie gave us on this past Fun Times Tuesdays meeting. I already have a portfolio of my own in development since last summer, but it is definitively not a polished gem and still needs so much more time and attention. But I am done with my summer class now, so I should have plenty of time to dedicate to this matter. This meeting could not have come at a better time!

The first thing they talked about in the meeting was the different site builders there are. But, on that matter I am already biased in favor of Wix, since it’s a site I’ve learned to work on since I was in the 6th grade. (Fun fact: the first page I ever built was a site on Koalas, the different types there are, and stuff like that. Sadly, I can’t link it due to the fact that it was built with Flash and has since disappeared.) I don’t have the premium version, though. But I think that’s probably going to be something worth getting to upgrade my site. I don’t know much about the benefits yet, but I know it allows you to add a favicon, and ever since I learned what they were working as an STA, now I really want to make one for myself.

Moving on, they talked about owning a domain for your portfolio, which is something I definitively need to get. Right now, my portfolio is linked as cvn2010.wixsite.com/portfolio, which is not only a really long title that’s hard to remember, the “wixsite” kind of takes away some of the professionalism out of it. Also, they said Google Domains is a great and cheaper way to purchase domains compared to GoDaddy. So that’s what I’ll be using.

Concerning, what goes into the portfolio, I’m glad to say I’m already good on the One-Off’s department, since I have a bunch of different mockups I’ve done for my advertising classes in the past. However, I need to do better on the Case Study department. The thing is, I have the content for that (also from my advertising classes), but it’s not something I’ve added into my portfolio just yet.

Considering the general formatting of my portfolio, that’s something that’s always concerned me since I started it, because, as of right now, I don’t think it looks very professional and I also don’t think I’m taking advantage of the space, either. Right now, it the main page looks like this (the background image is a gif, though, I really like that):

(It’s the logo from the Logo Design KB for me…)

Also, as you might have noticed, I have also not added a freelancing tab yet. But to be honest, I’m going to wait till this week’s Fun Times Tuesday meeting to even consider that. As of right now I wouldn’t really know how to approach that topic.

Anyway, the final piece of advise I wanted to talk about was something I specifically asked for: would it be better to have more pages with less content or less pages with more content? The answer was pretty much, it depends. But, upon further elaboration Maddy and Valerie helped me realize that overall I just (personally) need to have less content on display on my site. It’s not about the quantity of content you put out, but the quality of it, and I definitively have projects I’m not necessarily proud of on display in my portfolio… I’ll have to change that.

All in all, I really learned a lot from this presentation and I’m glad we had the time and opportunity to talk about that. Maddy, Valerie, if you are reading this, thank you very much, and stay tuned for my updated portfolio (coming soon to a theater near you)…

OCILL Update

Howdy y’all, and happy (day after the) 4th of July! 🎉 Hope you had a good one this year, specially compared to whatever was going on last year mid-pandemic… Anyway, let’s get down to business…

Last week my biggest project to work on was OCILL. Which, as you might remember, relies on transferring a long list of different activities and resources from their current state to a Canvas course for the Intermediate Intensive Turkish courses 1 and 2.

Today I realized that, as of this moment, I’ve worked on 28 different quizzes and pages for this task, and I’m both surprised and proud of that, because building some of these activities can be very time-consuming. Just today, I worked on an audio page that displayed 72 different phrases, and that’s nothing compared to a 100+ page a fellow STA recently worked on. Anyway, I feel like it’s such a rushed project considering to the extensive amount of activities to do relative to the soon-to-come due date, that I haven’t even had time to realize how much I’ve been putting in the hours and effort into it. By this point, I might just go ahead and learn Turkish myself, haha.

By the way, disregard the images from last post, the format for those has been changed. The thing about this project is that there are constant alterations going on, since we STAs keep finding issues on the activities and the professor’s on vacation. But no worries, there’s a meeting with Dr. Okur set for tomorrow, and Miguel, Poonum and Angie (our lead STAs on this project) will let us know what to do next.

Nevertheless, here are some of the pages/quizzes I’ve worked on recently…

OCILL

This week, my main task has been working on the OCILL project, where myself and a group of other STAs are working on transferring a bunch of different activities and resources from their current state to a Canvas course for the Intermediate Intensive Turkish courses 1 and 2.

Specifically, I’ve worked on building some resources pages, and many quizzes. Here are some of them in preview mode:

Animation Project – Script

On Tuesday the Animation Project team, myself included, had a meeting to discuss our ideas of what the animation could be. But first, let me tell you what this project is about. The animation project is one proposed by Suloni, where she prompted us to develop an animation that could potentially be submitted to a SXSW film/animation presentation. So, based on that, we have to take inventory of what each person brings to the group and assign roles based on that, as well as come up with a theme and style that works for everybody’s skill level and desired outcomes.

The Parameters of the Project are as follows:

1. Must be an Animation
2. No longer than 10 mins no shorter than 5 mins
3. Needs to contain a plot, at least one character, one object, and one environment
4. Needs to contain sound at least once
5. Timeline: TBD

And the following were the roles available:

1. Animation Director or Creative Director (Abriella’s Role)

2. Script Writer

3. Storyboard Artist

4. Character / Landscape Designer

5. The Animator and Inbetweener

6. Sound Designer / Voice Actor

Now that you have some more context, let me tell you how Tuesday’s meeting went. First things first, before the meeting, we were tasked to research an animation style we want to try out, come up with a theme for our animation to develop a story out of, and write down a list of skills you have that might relate to the positions listed. The following were my proposals:

Animation Style: something watercolor or pencil art, 8 bit-like, or stop motion

Theme: dreams, memories, going to your happy place (the three of which were the same as some previously suggested), reunions, wonder/imagination

Things I could contribute to:
– Writing
– Character/Landscape Design
– Sound/Voice

Based on that, the following became our official plan:

• Scriptwriter: Cristina and Ingrid will write together on the same document. The rest of us will offer specific dream imagery, symbolism, and ideas. All of our ideas combined will become the animation.
• Move on to storyboarding after script: De’sha and Angie will create rough sketches collaboratively. Cristina will develop the background of the storyboard with them, and Ingrid will make sure the storyboard matches up with the storyline.
• Character design: Angie and De’sha will character design together (turn arounds).
• Landscape design: Cristina and  Ingrid at the same time character designs are happening, will work on creating a landscape.
• Animator: De’sha will animate and Aangie will help with exporting and helping.
• Sound: While the animation is happening Cristina and Ingrid will work together to create custom sounds — no copyrighted music whilst checking-in to see how long certain parts of a scene or sound are happening with De’sha to make appropriate audio.
• Abriella will be taking notes of all the steps needed to make this animation happen, check-in at every step for feedback and suggestions, keep everything organized.

Research for Meaningful Brand Systems: Feedback & Test Run

Since we have the KB lessons project going on to create and refresh our STA trainings, we are also doing a feedback and test run set of rounds to make sure that the KBs are up to par. Recently, I was assigned to do that for Athena’s Branding: Research for Meaningful Brand Systems KB.

I won’t bore you with the details of the feedback I gave, but the following are my results for the activities as I performed the test run:

Instructions: Stop and Reflect

After learning about UT’s brand guidelines, take some time to reflect. Does your perception of UT align with the identity UT sought to create? Why or why not? Do you have any specific examples in mind of how you noticed UT manifesting its principles? Let us know in the Basecamp comments.

Instructions: Stop and Reflect

Ways brands use brand identity and strategies to execute their values:

– To target a specific audience

– To position themselves against their competition and stand out

For the Conducting a Brand Audit activity I collected a bunch of different images for logos, social media pages, slogans, blogs and news, and color schemes. Then I wrote the following for how these things contribute to the Visual Identity of the College of Liberal Arts:

All of these are great examples of ways the College of Liberal Arts visually represents their brand identity, mainly seen through cohesive colors and similar typography. It in not only successful on unifying the brand identity within COLA, but also with the general UT identity.

Last but not least, here is my final brand book for the Fairy Forest Cafe prompt in the Applying the Concepts activity.

Here’s a better look at the menu:

Lab Page Update

This was an easy task. Basically, I just had to rephrase the following sentence into a new one for the Lab Page:

Old: “The Mezes 4th floor computer lab equipment check-out services have ceased until further notice. No reopening date has been established.”

New: “The lab equipment rental services at the Mezes 4th floor are temporarily closed until further notice.”