This summer, I got the opportunity to intern at Epic Systems as a UX Design intern! While I wouldn’t recommend living in Wisconsin, I had a great experience with the UX team there and learned a bunch of cool new things (totally an expert in genomics now). It was really interesting to see how design played a role in the company and compare it to how I’ve been approaching it in school/orgs!
Task: Make sure all utexas websites are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliant
Status: In Progress
Client: Jonathan Cortez
Task: The Frontera Scholars Collective (FSC) would like a logo that will be the branding mark for their organization. They want something clean and polished, while also providing an exciting feel to the design.
Status: Complete
I started by looking at inspiration based off of want the client wanted the logo to look like. He wanted the logo to be a dragonfly with stained glass style wings. Additionally, the colors had to be blue and gold.
I then made a couple options, creating different dragonflies and trying out different text placements.
After receiving some feedback, I fleshed out and colorized some of the options from my sketches.
We then chose 3 logos from my 6 and made some mock-ups for the client.
I got a lot of feedback from the client on these three logos. Overall, he wanted the design to be more detailed and realistic. He referenced this photo a lot as a guideline for the orientation and level of detail he wanted. He also gave some suggestions on making the tail shaped like the US-Mexican border and incorporating the name into the wings.
I tried to implement most of the feedback I was given. However, I had to modify some suggestions a little bit because it just wouldn’t look good visually. The tail looked a little strange being so wiggly and the there was no easy way to shade the wings in a way that showcased the words nicely.
Because I didn’t love how this looked, I made another version with the border inside the pattern of the tail instead. For both versions, I also put the words inside the wings, just not shaded into them.
I then had a meeting with the client to discuss these iterations. He ended up liking the second option more, but he wanted me to also add the words “UT Austin” somewhere on the design.
With all this in mind, I made 3 final designs.
Client: Jonathan Cortez, the Carranzas
Task: Create a website/branding to introduce The Carranza Chicano Archive.
Status: Complete
Clean, Iconography of the Chicana/o movement inspired
I started the design process by looking at inspiration. The client wanted the design assets to reference iconography from within the Chicano movement, while keeping a dynamic look. The client also wanted the color palette to be made up of deep burnt orange, mustard yellow, navy blues, and forest greens.
Create a repeatable abstract motif/banner graphic for the site. Indigenous iconography (Aztec & Mayan).
Several options of implementations of the above assets.
The client wanted to include a Hunab-Ku somewhere on the homepage, so I tried several different variations and placements.
We ended up choosing to going with it being in the hero section, with a transparent background.
This break was mainly a chance for me to rest after the craziness that was last semester. That said, during the first week, I worked for LAITS a little bit and also worked on my portfolio :’). For fun, I caught up with old friends from high school, went on a cruise to the Caribbean with my family, and watched a ton of Star Wars!
Client: Life & Letters
Task: Life & Letters (official COLA magazine) wants a WordPress template that they can update periodically with their print publication.
Status: In progress, working on the About page
Visit the live site: https://utw11345.utweb.utexas.edu/
I created a design for the main menu. Previously, the hierarchy of the text felt off and there was too much white space. I created a new design that kept “Sections” and “Collections” the main categories, but also gave more emphasis to the “Research”, “Art & Culture”, and “College Communities” categories, which were really tiny before.
