Isa Melendez

✧⋆ Week 4 – Isa ⋆✧

April 9, 2026 By Isa Melendez

🍓 Week 4: Training Progress 🍓

✧⋆ After showing the last designs to the client, they loved it!

✧⋆ This card will be placed in over 1,000 classrooms this Summer to help UT faculty and staff. I'm so honored to be contributing in a way that will help UT faculty and staff get the information they need!

✧⋆ Last week's STA meeting we covered how to present properly. I learned that a vital part of presenting is storytelling, to be able to walk the audience through an entire project from start to finish assuming they knew nothing about it is key.

✧⋆ My passion project involves the work I've done with the Texas Cultural Trust! I won't get into too many details, but this project has taught me a lot about how to communicate more effectively with stakeholders.

✧⋆ We learned that the project was out of our scope. We needed to tell our client a more realistic goal, but this only happened deep into the project. Our team had already expressed these concerns way before, but we never talked with the client about these concerns. I took away that I needed to not be so afraid to speak up and not waste anybody's time.

✧⋆ I have presented to my organization who are already aware of many of the details, so having to present this project in front of people who had no context was both a challenge and very helpful.

✧⋆ I was tasked with making an animated intro for a class of my choice. I decided to go with an informatics course called Online Communities. I started ideating with my iPad, sketching out general placement and icons I was thinking of including.

✧⋆ Storyboard: I wanted to have each icon rotate back and forth in the animation

✧⋆ Final: I decided to make the course name and number look as if it were a message and I animated it like one! I made it so that only the white icons rotated back and forth as I found it too much with every graphic. I went to Illustrator first to make all the graphics, made each layer separate and named it properly, and brought that into After Effects to animate.

✧⋆ Having to present was really useful! I need to improve on my storytelling and rehearsing beforehand would help me with my stuttering issue and confidence.

✧⋆ I haven't used After Effects too much, so having to animate studio graphics was out of my comfort zone. It was really interesting to learn and I am a lot more comfortable with making keyframes now!

Week 3 – Isa

April 2, 2026 By Isa Melendez

✨🍓 Week 3: Training Progress 🍓✨

Last week I spent a lot of time making the Digital Wall monitor for this tier, once I had that set in stone, the rest of the graphics came quickly!

I was a lot more focused on simplicity this time around. I made sure to stick to a single primary color, that being the red, and made sure that was consistently shown throughout all the graphics. It was interesting to have to think about the wardrobe the professor would have to keep in mind. I never thought about it before, but it’s true that they could clash with the background with certain colors. For example, wearing red for this studio set would surely clash, but a green or blue would help the professor stand out.

This is my first project where I’m working with real clients! I was tasked with redesigning the current Helpdesk Place Card. This is the current design:

They are usually on grey desks, and the current design makes them blend in, so I needed to make them stand out whilst still adhering to the LAITS Style Guide. This would mean sticking to their color palette, using the right fonts, and the right logo.

My first iteration:

This was a nice direction and I was told to make a mockup of them, so I put them on a gray desk much like how it would be in real life. Here are the initial mockups:

I received the following feedback:

Align LAITS logo with the icons
Try capitalizing titles and increasing the size
Change the light orange and light blue to white
Make gray lighter in QR area

The alignment of the text/icons and whether the titles should be all caps or not were the main question. Keeping all this in mind, these were my next few iterations:

The favorite of all the iterations was this one:

I’m still waiting for more feedback, but I’m pretty sure this may be the final version we end up going with!

It’s so interesting to see how many iterations you have to go through before you end up landing on the one that everyone is happy with. Design is an iterative process and rarely is ever linear, so it’s been a really cool journey to see how a design can develop!

Week 2 – Isa

March 26, 2026 By Isa Melendez

Training Progress

This week I have been focused on making studio graphics. It’s been a bit of a journey, I ended up with a lot of iterations of the Digital Wall Monitor.

Moodboarding

I started out trying to figure out a direction for the class I selected (I320 U/S: Online Communities)

The direction that was approved was the first one. So thats what I went with going into making the other graphics.

Digital Wall Monitor

I had some trouble trying to keep things simple… given the inspiration I wanted to be maximalist, but a background is meant to be a background! Not the main visual. Especially whenever it comes to an online class, you wouldn’t want the background to be distracting. Here are some of my iterations:

This was my first iteration. I was advised that the bottom left was too attention-grabbing and that I should get rid of the numbers, since your eye darts to read it.

I blurred the numbers out of curiosity with how that could look instead of just getting rid of them entirely, but I eventually ended getting rid of the numbers.

This iteration I really tried making the attention go to the center rather than the bottom left… but it became way too distracting. I needed to tone this down a fair bit.

This iteration was one of my stronger ones and closets to what the final ended up being. It still felt like a little too much was going on… but I focused on adding more dimension by making the center pop out more as if it were stamped atop of everything else.

Final Digital Wall Monitor

Mockup

She shines bright like a diamond

Overall Reflection

Understanding that the background is meant to support the subject was my most important takeaway. Of course designing very intricate details is fun, but it can adversely work against you. I’ll keep this is mind whenever it is time for me to take on a real class. Simple is better!

My first STA Blog!

March 5, 2026 By Isa Melendez

My day as an STA

So far, I have spent a majority of my time getting used to all of the applications STAs use in their day-today! Making sure to message in Slack, constantly monitor my emails and Basecamp notifications, and setting timers in Harvest dependent on what I am currently working on.
Admittedly, I used to be the kind of person who would always close tabs and avoid multi-tasking, but this past week has led to to learn how to juggle multiple tasks and actually keep track of the tabs I have instead of resorting to deleting them
I am also a Windows user, so switching from that to Apple was a bit of a hurdle for me, but I adapted a lot quicker than I thought I would! I’m still trying to remember how the shortcuts work, but I am a lot more confident in handling a Macbook now