V-Labbin’

I don’t have a ton of updates this week besides more VLabs work. We really are out here doing this VLabs work.

 

I found a lot of duplicate interactives in between the labs and noted which ones, so I hope that helps save the team time not having to make graphics we’ve already made. It’ll help the course look more cohesive too.

 

It says they’re checked off but they’re not truly done! Mwahahaha

 

 

Other than that I have been working at reviewing others’ PSDs and assembling them in Canvasser. It’s good practice in following a style guide and otherwise looking for precedents. Cohesion and teamwork >> what each person personally thinks it should be at this point. I’ve also learned to animate Canvassers!

 

 

 

 

HDO301

Project: HDO 301
Client /Prof: HDO
Completion status: July-Aug 2019
Staff guidance: Suloni Robertson
STA team members: me!
Description/plans:Create graphic assets for online HDO course, including powerpoint templates, backdrops, credits, etc.
To be completed: mid-August

 

Well well well… another week has passed by as an STA. I took a small break from monkey skulls aka VLabs to create some assets for the Intro to Human Dimensions of Orgs online course. The long-term goal is to be able to reuse these templates for any online HDO course. The department wanted to emphasize the HDO and UT brand/logo in case the slides ever appear outside of their usual context.

 

As a student I know it can feel weird if your classes feel super modern/polished/branded/whatever so I was not going for avant-garde with these designs. Lowkey=good, which is why of HDO’s three brand colors (orange, blue, gray), I used gray as the main accent color in the final. I’m sharing two drafts and and the final version is below those.

 

Drafts:

 

Final:

 

It sounds like the professor will show up in a small video box in the right bottom corner of slides, so I kept it blank down there. Next I’ll make some simple backdrop and title assets for the video team to include in recordings.

 

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Personal life update, I found a really nice couch dumpster diving so sold my old one for $50! Now maybe I can get a coffee table.

Blanton Museum

Last week us STAs took a field trip to the Blanton Museum. I always like visiting the Blanton, especially as a nice break in between classes or work on campus.

 

We visited “Austin,” the permanent building installation by Ellsworth Kelly. It is a pseudo-cathedral constructed with materials from Spain, Germany, and the US (Georgia and Austin). I enjoy Kelly and others like Frank Stella who work in the abstract color blocked style, and it’s interesting to see that translated into a structure. The black and white “paintings” are actually black and white marble, each sourced across the world, and fused together.

The lighting in the building is gorgeous but doesn’t translate well to iPhone photography. So I rocked with it and made this edit.

Next was the Jeffrey Gibson exhibition. It featured geometric paintings and beaded sculptures inspired by his experiences growing up Native American living abroad. It was interesting how his art incorporated many words and even phrases (some lyrics?), I think it added a lot to the exhibit. It was a great time!

 

 

Though honestly anything is better than the Blanton’s last exhibit where the featured piece was a “make tacos not war” neon sign… like are you kidding me? I’m sorry but that’s been done in 1,000,000 ~quirky~ South Congress-esque stores. Or like, cards from 2012. That’s my hot art take of the day. Thank you.

Making Signs

I had some free time yesterday to make this guy in Photoshop with the Timeline tool.  🙂

 

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I got the chance to design signage for LAITS Computer Support. Here’s my draft + final based off what was requested. The final sign will be 34″ x 10″ and be placed on their door in Parlin Hall. The font I used, Roboto Condensed, is so geometric. See the way the uppercase S lines up with the top of the lowercase u? Roboto isn’t a bad font but Open Sans will always have my heart for sans-serif body typefaces.

 

First draft:

Final draft, with larger text to fill up the white space:

 

Suloni asked if I could make a simple style guide for future signage. This is a rough draft of it. The Computer Support signage is pretty simple so there was no need to make it long. I did want to include examples because I’m a visual learner and I’m sure most design STAs looking at it in the future will be too.

 

VLabs Updates

I spent most of last week working on a looot of PSDs for VLabs.

 

 

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I’ve noticed the lab activity interactives at the end of each lab are more complicated than other sections, so I’m looking forward to getting feedback since they’re each unique. A lot of them include graphs, calculations, and measuring so I did what I could to stick to style guide. On many graphs a dot must be placed in the correct location for the user to pass, so I’d like to see how assembling interactives like these work in Canvasser (below).

 

 

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Speaking of Canvasser, it can sometimes be a challenge, but I feel like this interactive below came out well in terms of toggling between “shared with humans” and “unique features.” Originally the user would have to double click the links for the popup to show because the on/off toggle was getting confused up behind the scenes. We were able to finesse the property options under Click/Touch Event ID to work.

 

 

Next up is adding videos into the HTML on the Grav site.

 

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I’m about to start my Cascade test site, and I’m not sure what to expect since at first glance it seems different from WordPress or any other CMS I’ve used before. Other than that I’ve been learning to edit Photo IDs and completed lots of orientation work.

Starting out

Hello world! I’m Maddy, and I’m in my fourth year of studying advertising. A little about me, I’m from DFW, I think all cats are queens, and I like to DJ for fun. I also have a good amount of experience in design (not to brag but I was commissioned for my first logo design in 6th grade… yes it was for my dad), which is what drew me to LAITS and being a design + coding STA in the first place.

 

This is about to be my third full week as an STA and I’m really enjoying it. Everyone has been so helpful and kind throughout my whole onboarding process and the work is enjoyable too.

 

The major project this summer is creating all 12 units of Vlabs interactives for the physical anthropology course. While I’m sure it’ll start getting tedious coloring in monkey bones all day, it’s been nice finding a good workflow and getting comfy with the Vlabs style guide.

 

Here’s a screenshot of one interactive:

 

 

 

This was another I made, which ended up being a couple hundred layers after creating the graph and all the interactive elements. It’s definitely like a puzzle remaking an interactive. I recreate each piece of the original, while thinking of small ways to improve its layout, as well as staying thoughtful of how the next person will have to animate it in Canvasser.

 

 

So far so good at LAITS! I’ll check in again soon.

 

Project: Virtual Labs
Client /Prof: UT Anthropology
Completion status: Started spring 2019
Staff guidance: Suloni Robertson
STA team members: Jaclyn Alford, Valerie Tran, Emily Park, Bridget, Chloe Kim, Olivia Wilczek, Abriella Corker
Description/plans: Move + update the Virtual Laboratory for Physical Anthropology from Flash to HTML
To be completed: End of summer 2019