McCombs

We met with the McCombs team last week to go over design options and settled on some new ideas. We decided the wall monitor behind the prof should be a photo of McCombs, since its less jarring than a lot of text. The photo I chose is not 100% cohesive with the rest of the theme, but I am really waiting on McCombs’ feedback.

I created Powerpoint templates, Canvas graphics, and an opening animation idea for each video. This is my first project working directly with clients at LAITS so I’m learning a lot about how in-person client comm works.

Geography Flyer

Had a very quick turnaround with this badboy (two hours!) but sometimes that’s what it takes in the Biz. This was a perfect chance to use my favorite graphic element: the topographic map. Used colors from a previous LAITS graphic for the Geography department, and used photos provided by the client.

German Retractable Banner

I’ve started designing a big retractable banner for the German Department. Draft 1 an ideal mockup done at a proportionally smaller size but now I’m running into some issues making the full size version.

Mainly, I’m not totally comfortable building large files at a high DPI. One issue is font size – the printing company told me 10pt will be legible, but in Draft 2 the body copy is already 46pt and seems very small. I still am not sure if that is a file size or DPI issue (I think the former). I’ll just have to eyeball what looks proportional.

Another issue is the provided images are small – the images at the bottom of Draft 2 are sized about 6-7″, but since the banner is 33″ wide, they’re too small for this design. I may need to do a collage, which I fear would look chaotic with all the grainy black and white photography. I’m waiting for some new photos from our client.

Update as of 12/10

Final design incorporating client feedback. They sent over new photos and we removed the white headers/footers because they drew too much attention.

McCombs Online Courses

I’ve spent the last few weeks attending client meetings for some of McCombs’ massive open online courses (MOOCs). McCombs already has a pretty robust comm+branding team but I’ve been able to explain to them what design options LAITS has for making a well branded course. I went through the McCombs brand book before designing some of the mockups.

#1 – McCombs network pattern:

#2 – Photography:

WIP

Project: McCombs EdX launch
Client/Prof: McCombs School of Business
Completion status: started September 11th
Staff guidance: Suloni Robertson
STA team members: Just me so far
Description/plans: Creating digital and studio assets for 3-4 online courses
To be completed: End of October(?)

Managing VLabs

Our previous STA who had been managing VLabs has graduated (Valerie, you and your Luna updates are missed) and I have taken her place managing this beast of a project. I’m excited about this role and honored to move up this quickly at LAITS. I hope I can be as encouraging and helpful as she was. There’s about 5-6 of us working part-time on this now, so things will move slower but I hope to keep things organized and moving forward.

The first thing I did was some reorganization of our Basecamp to-dos. Each person has a clean list that will appear in their general to-do’s now. I hope with this system everyone can clearly see their assignments and where they are in the pipeline.

To keep up momentum I’ve trained a couple of STAs on how to review PSDs and they are all doing great!

Suloni has also asked me to create some new beginner and intermediate level trainings for Canvasser and Adobe XD. I’m honestly really excited at the prospect of more management and training-oriented roles as an STA. These tasks are coincidentally matching up well with my coursework this semester in Management and Org Comm. Communication, organization, and improving systems are where I thrive and I look forward at a chance to improve my teaching skills. Senior year and it’s all coming together!

More on HDO 301

I’ve made a lot of progress since my last post on HDO 301 assets. The design parameters for this project included using the HDO branding, including logo and the orange, blue, and dark gray. It also needed to be clear this is UT affiliated, in case any assets are ever shared out of context. For this type of course, since the content is business-adjacent, I decided a professional and simple design style works best. Overall, I’m happy with the final look.

The Powerpoint slides, which I’ve shared before. The more I look at it, the more I like the image I chose of the tower with people walking under it to represent human dimensions of organizations.

To make it easier on the professor I learned how to create Powerpoint templates so they are able to input their content without worrying about formatting.

End card to play at the end of class:

GIF

Lower third card, I was surprised how well Photoshop got the job done animating this:

GIF

Graphics for background sets and screens: