Racial Geography Tour

project: Racial Geography Tour CSS/JavaScript
Client /Prof: 
completion status: Assigned on Oct 17 (Wed); working on CSS for tour stop sidebar
staff guidance: Stacy Vlasits
STA team members: Stacy, Me
description/plans: Use CSS to make WordPress Site look like the mockup (designed by Jac I believe?)
To be completed: N/A

I got moved from the 15 Minute History project to this one! Personally, I am liking CSS a lot beter (it’s wayy more intuitive than php). My task is to help Stacy make the raw WordPress site look like the mockup (shown below). He gave a pretty quick crash course over CSS syntax, and I’ve been learning it as I go ever since.

Raw Homepage:

What the Tour stops look like as of now:

What they used to look like:

My end goal:

Russian Object Creation

Made a toothbrush holder for Tate! It’s going to be mounted on the bathroom walls. It was pretty simple and quick to make:

NWAV

So my logo got chosen for the NWAV 49 Conference! We submitted our designs this summer, and now I have to make several deliverables (like a FB propic, twitter banner, t-shirt, mug, etc.) which is pretty exciting.

Website Icon:

Twitter Propic:

Web Banner:

Psych CE:

My logo for Psych CE also got picked! I’m going to be working on finalizing it for the official website using UT brand guidelines and making slide title cards for the course. Apparently, the professor really liked my design which is pretty cool!

The leaf logo she picked: (will change font)

Jac’s UI mockup:

VLABS:

VLabs is almost done!!! We have about 2-3 more labs to do, and then we can start working on interactives. (Which Nick will be helping out on when he gets back.) Good work everyone!

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/10/24/25373-2/

COOL THING I DID!

So this past weekend I went to Chillenium Game Jam. A Game Jam is basically where your team (of 4) makes a game from scratch in 48 hrs. Our team went in with ZERO experience, so our game was pretty much a bust BUT we did manage to turn in a playable executable.

Our game was called Quiet Wolf, and the objective is to complete the puzzles by turning into a wolf or back into a girl. Ex: the wolf can ump higher than the girl, and the girl can pick up items to unlock doors and kill monsters!

We made our game in Unity, which required coding in C#. Since the team needed me to make the graphics, I didn’t get to do any real coding. But I did learn quite a bit about designing graphics for games!

What our final product looked like:

Some sprites I did for running wolf animation:

Tile sheet:

backgrounds:

I did all these in photoshop. The animation/create frame animation function was super useful with making each frame for the animations. There was a also a lot of Pinteresting and googling for inspiration. We didn’t win anything, but one of the staff there did compliment the look of our game, so I’m pretty proud!

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/10/17/25238-2/

15 Minute History:

I ran into bit of a roadblock this week for 15 Minute History: I just didn’t really know where to start. But I talked to Stacy on Monday, and he gave me a little more direction.So I think I can get a little more work done. The issue was that there were some things that Stacy needed to complete before I could go in to do my part, and a lot of it requires deeper understanding of web development (which I don’t really have yet).

He mentioned wanting to sit down with me to go over the actual WordPress database and infrastructure to give me a better idea of how to build the site, so I’ll need to find time for that soon. But for now, I’m slowly adding functionality piece by piece on my own.

Without being too technical and wordy, here’s what I’m doing now:

I’ve been adding this feature using a plug-in so that we can have podcast pages show “related podcasts” kind of like the YouTube recommended side bar.

I’ve also been trying to find out how to make the speaker -> podcast relationship go both ways. (Stacy said he hasn’t figured out how to do this yet either, so I could give it a shot). Because right now, only the single speaker pages have lists of their podcasts, but not vice versa.

So you can see there’s a list of all of Joan’s podcasts on her page…

but the speakers aren’t listed on the podcast pages!

This feature takes some php coding, so I’ve trying to do some major googling.

vLabs:

We’re making some major headway with vlabs! Right now, we’re about halfway done. I think we’re getting ready to talk with Ruben soon about incorporating the interactives using Canvasser. Great job to everyone who’s been working on it!!

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/10/17/25233-2/

project: Banner Design & UI design for 15 Minute History WordPress site
Client /Prof: Christopher Rose
completion status: Started back-end work 1st week of October; received design notes Oct. 8
staff guidance: Stacy Vlasits
STA team members: Me, (Potentially Emily/Bridget)
description/plans: Update 15 Minute History banner for new wordpress site, also add few redesign elements to overall website look
To be completed: ~Oct. 31

Some more details about the 15 Minute History project:

I got the design notes that Suloni received in a meeting with Chris Rose, and sh’e giving me the option to ether art direct or complete the banner/UI design myself. I’ve liked managing projects (like what I’m doing for vlabs and cascade), so I’m leaning towards  trying my hand at art directing. I’m considering asking either Emily or Bridget to work on this project, so I’ll be asking them soon. Once I’ve settled this, I’ll be emailing Chris about starting the design process.

The design notes stated that Chris wanted a grayscale banner with a grid of pictures (similar to the Harry Ransom Center banner), but lighter and brighter. Suloni also mentioned that Chris knows photoshop, so we’ll be giving him a .psd file that he can edit. It’s actually pretty cool how he has an eye for design (example of his personal website below); it should make the whole design process smoother.

Other projects:

As for vlabs, progress is coming along nicely. Special shoutout to Melissa for already finishing two labs! No significant problems have really come up, so not much to report here!

Cascade re-documentation is taking a backseat with many STA’s working on projects for Stacy. Once, we get a little farther in vlabs, I’ll probably try to pick up the pace for Cascade.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/10/10/25078-2/

Eanthro Vlabs

The vlabs have been coming along pretty nicely. So far, we have about 3 labs finished; everyone has been a tremendous help! There’s been a few instances of where images have annotations that aren’t actually part of the image (put in via flash), and other interactives with a lot of text where we’ve had to use our own judgement about what and where to put the text on the new website. Overall, it’s been going pretty smoothly though.

https://anthro-virtual-labs.development.la.utexas.edu/ 

Cascade Documentation

I’m also going to be organizing putting the Cascade documentation into the actual cascade site. Right now, we are working on editing the document based on the packet of edits that Andre gave us earlier in the summer. Since, the packet is slightly dated (some parts hadn’t been documented yet when he reviewed it), we may have to consult him on several things during this part of the process. After we finish editing, I want to get Valerie and Emily to test the documentation. I’ll have to go over basic cascade with them beforehand too. Then finally, I’ll have everyone work on putting the tested steps into cascade. It’s been pretty busy for several STAs lately, so we might now be able to finish before the end of October.

15 Minute History

I also got assigned to a coding/wordpress project for Stacy! Basically, this website is a UT history podcast site, and Stacy has been working on transferring the site content into a better site format using WordPress. We’re trying to get some functions such as a better/automated Speaker index and episode list index. My current assignment is to create fields for each Speaker, so that they can be indexed through the WordPress system and connected to their respective podcasts and categories. After I do this part, Stacy will have me do some basic php coding to add functionality to the site. I’ve pretty much never worked with web development before, so this is an exciting project!

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/10/03/24952-2/