Farewell Post 

Wow. Jeez. I can’t believe this is my last day. I began working as a design STA a year ago, and now I am already leaving.

I have had such a wonderful time working at LAITS this year. Everyone here is so kind and nice, and I have genuinely enjoyed every single project I have worked on. Honestly, I wish I had known about LAITS’ design studio back when I was an underclassman. It’s such a great program that teaches invaluable skills. Besides graphic design, I have learned so much about client communication, collaboration, and numerous other soft professional skills that will help me as I navigate the corporate™ world. The STA program in general is a great stepping stone job for students, and I wish the best of luck to all of our STAs in the future!

Goodbyes

Before anything else, I want to say goodbye to all our current full timers and STAs.

Suloni – Suloni you are so kind and such a talented artist! You have guided me on countless projects, and taught me so much about design and client communication. I cannot thank you enough for all your help. You are the glue that keeps the design team together, and a friend to everyone! Keep LAITS staying magical!

Also, obviously, I have always admired your eyeball slack photo.

Valerie – Valerie you are so talented and funny. You have been such an incredibly helpful manager, and your art advice is invaluable. I remember back when I worked on that art nouveau training, and you were so insightful in how I could edit my photo to better fit the style (that was also a lot of fun). You have wonderful options for office music, and are always able to keep good vibes going at the office.

Also – your illustrations are so wonderful, and I can’t wait to see what else you make!

In general, thank you so much for all your help!

Maddy – Maddy, you are super cool and such a wonderful graphic designer. I came here struggling to even understand how different text fonts complemented each other, and now I have work I can put into a portfolio! You are so sweet and helpful, and have an adorable cat (tell Shrimp I said hi). I’ve always admired how sleek and modern your designs are, and also how you can incorporate serif fonts and more “old-timey” styles into your designs without them appearing clunky. You also have such a keen eye!

Also, Capybaras:

Adrian – You were one of my first friends here at LAITS. Thank you so much for sitting next to me during those beginning days, and talking about books with me! You are so sweet and talented and have great taste in weird plants and alien things. I wish you the BEST of luck with your writing, design, and anything else you decide to endeavor into in the future. I hope you have a wonderful final year at UT, and I’m looking forward to see what you do next!

De’sha – De’sha, you are one of the most artistic, fashionable people I have ever met. You also have the best eye for shades of pink that I have ever seen. Your animations and designs are incredible, and I absolutely cannot wait to see what you do after graduation. I know the animation industry can be stressful, but I fully believe in you and know you will do great!! Keep doing what you’re doing, and please keep wearing those awesome butterfly sunglasses.

Estella – I know you have technically left, but I do hope you see this. I absolutely LOVE your art, and it was super fun having you in office as the resident web dev. Congratulations again on your new job in Dallas, and I hope your move has gone well! You are so talented both as a web developer and artist, and I know you will absolutely knock the socks off at your new job.

Louisa – Louisa, I know we haven’t known each other long, but you are such a kind, interesting person. I’ve really enjoyed helping you with the trainings, and talking with you on our down time. You’re a very talented designer, and I hope your graduate school search goes well AND is fun and exciting. And if you ever need advice about looking for graduate schools, I just did it last year! I hope you have a wonderful fall semester and you will do great things at LAITS –  I believe it.

Leilani – Leilani, as with Louisa, I haven’t known you for too long. You are, however, super nice and very cool. I really admire your design skills, and I have also really enjoyed helping you as you began your career as an STA. I know that you will do great things at LAITS and beyond, and look forward to see what you make next!

As for everyone else who has already left a few months ago, thank you so much too! I hope you are all doing well and enjoying your new jobs and schools!

Favorite Projects

While working this year at LAITS, I have worked on a variety of projects. I wanted to list here some of my favorites that I’ve worked on:

• General Animated Stingers – This was one of the first projects I ever did. I really loved coming up with ways to animate the stingers created by Sheryl. I also learned quite a bit about taking items in illustrator and applying them to after effects. Previously, I’d really only used photoshop, so this was a huge learning experience. It was also super fun to work with someone as talented as De’sha on this project!
• AFR – I loved working on the course graphics for AFR with Sheryl and Abriella. They are both such talented graphic designers, and I learned so much about infographics by working on this project. The hardest one was definitely the venn diagram:

If you scroll back far enough on my blog, you can find the process I did to create this. It took some time as there’s so many ideas overlapping, and looking back on it now I would’ve definitely spaced things differently (Nationality is too far to the edge), but overall I was very happy with how it came out. In general, AFR really helped me gain skills I needed for other tasks at LAITS.

• Animated Stingers – GOV Courses – Over winter break, I created two stingers for GOV 360 and GOV 371. These were based on the AMAZING designs by Adrian, and were really fun to create. At that time I was quite stressed applying to graduate school, so it was really enjoyable to have something to work on to take my mind off of it.
• Dana Center Template/Infographics – My largest project I worked on at LAITS were infographics and page templates for the Dana Center. This project spanned almost 4 months, and was incredibly educational for me. Between the InDesign trainings and this project, I went from barely comprehending the software to becoming quite comfortable with it. I am still quite proud of how my templates came out, and I hope to use them in a portfolio at some point. We never did hear back about the infographics, but those were quite fun to make as well.
• CoLA Turtles – This was a smaller project, but near March I got to work on some animated turtle designs for the CoLA graduation video. I had a blast working on these designs, and I think they came out quite cute:
• Orientation Posters – Another more recent project I helped out in was creating photoshopped orientation posters. The main one I focused on was the Sci-Fi poster, where I photoshopped the Orientation Advisors to look like the cast of the film Interstellar. I also helped finish up the sit-com poster, which De’sha had begun. For this, I changed out the heads (and bodies separately) of several characters to look like characters from the Office. It was definitely a difficult task, but quite rewarding.
• Psy Labs Banner – My most recent larger project that I completed was the banner for TIES Psychology lab headed by Dr. Timmons. I picked this project up from Cristina, and worked on it from mid-may until now. This is the final edition (as of now):
• This project took quite some time to complete, but I am very happy with how the banner came out. Marianne also aided me in placing it on the website, so I got to actually see how it looks!

I worked on many other projects during my time as an STA, as well as quite a few trainings. While I did not get to finish up my trainings, I found them invaluably helpful, and I hope STAs in the future do as well!

A few other things I really enjoyed doing as an STA:

• Photo IDs (I just really find them satisfying to work on)
• Working with my teammates and helping problem solve
• Creating my blog!! I really enjoyed personalizing my blog, and seeing everyone else’s every week.

What now?

I realized yesterday as I walked around campus that it was the last time I would do so for a long while. There’s something inherently different about visiting a place once you’ve left. I see my old high school all the time (it’s close to where my parents live), but it never feels the same as when I was a student there.

I will honestly, wholeheartedly hold my experiences at UT and LAITS dear to my heart. I hope I can come back and visit some time. I am coming home over my winter break (early December to January), so I may stop by then if possible!

As for me, I am going to attend UCF’s Animation and Visual Effects Masters program starting this August. This next week, I am going to Hilo island in Hawaii with my parents, and then we are driving to Orlando. I will also be working part time as a TA, and rumors suggest they also use Harvest to count their hours (I wonder if they use Workday too)?

After I get my masters, I’d like to work in a studio or maybe teach (or do both). I will have to see where the wind takes me, I suppose. I’d also like to create a webcomic for fun some time…if I ever have the time.

Anyway, I’ve been rambling on this blog post for some time. It was actually hard for me to write this due to how sad I was getting, so I had to write it in bursts and work on other things while I did it. I think I’ve covered everything I wanted to touch on – but I just want to again say how much I appreciate everyone here and how much fun I’ve had working here. I wish everyone the best of luck, and please, keep on designing!

(Additionally, if you would like to email me, please contact me at rachelbsacks@gmail.com. I check my email VERY frequently).

Love,

Rachel

Updates 6/28/22

Updating KB For Photo IDs

The past few days, I have been working on updating the KB for the Photo ID training. The KB had some outdated information and also did not reflect our current standard image sizing (240 x 300 pixels.) To update the KB I went through this process:

1. Read through the KB in detail to see what I thought worked and what would need change

2. Created a google doc, where I copied and pasted all of the text from the KB

3. Edited the KB’s text in red

4. Sent the document to Valerie and Suloni. Both Suloni and Valerie helped me with some of the text wording, and we went through some of the issues with changing all of the content to reflect the 240 x 300 size change. Since we need to create a new best practices style guide for this, we decided to temporarily have a list of basic tools directly on the KB. Then, we can later create this style guide and update the KB with this:

I went through the various tools I thought I used the most, as well as a few others I felt would be useful. Then, I wrote small definitions for each. Interestingly enough, I hadn’t really thought about the mechanical differences between the brightness and exposure tools (I just knew they worked differently.) Learning about the differences from a technical standpoint was really enlightening.

5. After this, I went and updating the KB. Since some of the KB images were also out of date. Since the original screenshots involved using red boxes to show where tools were, I took some screenshots of my own photoshop and used red boxes/arrows/text to direct the viewers.

Once the photos were integrated into the system, they looked like this:

6. Once that was completed, the KB was finished. We may continue to edit it as we work on the best practices .pdf/have other ideas for photo editing.

7. I also went and edited the photo ID email template KB as well. This KB contains all of the templates for various situations STAs may find themselves in when emailing clients about photo IDs. We had quite a few new templates to add to it, as well as a few changes to make to the original templates (mainly, Suloni wanted to add links to the LAITS photo standards website). This KB is also ready to go!

Basecamp Profile Image

Last week, we were asked to create little profile pages for our basecamp accounts. These are about half-paper size, and share a bit of info about us (pronouns, major, interests, etc.). As I love to draw and didn’t have any non-selfie photos of myself that I love, I decided to draw myself. This was intended to be a cartoonish drawing, but I ended up deciding to have the colors more painterly.

Here is a speed-paint of the drawing:

After this, I integrated the photo into my profile. I went through a few draft versions before I decided on the final one that I used:

Old version with older font I decided it needed a bit more pizzazz so I added a gradient + some noise over it. I also changed the head font as I wanted there to be more of a difference between the main font and the subtitle font. I also bolded the subtitle fonts, because “trees” by itself looked a bit empty.

Here is the final version:

Other updates

• I am currently still working on drafts for the psy labs banner. We have finished the draft for the main image and are working on finding stock images to input inside the little phones/to use as imagery around the sides.
• I am also working on a new set of photo IDs, which I will update here when they are complete!

Updates 6/20/22

above: the striped house-cat in his natural habitat – the catio

Hello! Here are my updates as of 6/20/22:

Photo IDs

This past week I have primarily been working on photo ID requests for various COLA faculty, grad students, and staff.

We are currently planning to update the photo ID KB, and I am planning to create a document so this was a chance for me to get a sense of what I think may need be changed.

Almost all of the requests sent to me were perfect. Two graduate student images were missing, but I was able to contact them and have them successfully resubmit. I am currently waiting on one image to be resubmitted. I may need to send a follow up email if the corresponder does not respond at some point this week.

Here are the original images (left) vs. the cropped edits:

This image was very nice and needed very few edits. I up’d the saturation a bit to keep her skin from looking too cool.

Similarly – the LAITS photography is very professional and looks great. I up’d the saturation and contrast a bit to render the color a bit more cheerful.

For this one, the outside lighting rendered the professor a bit dark and was leaning a bit too heavy on the green scale. I up’d the exposure slightly (avoiding making the background too bright), and slid the color balance medium slightly over to the red so it was more neutral.

This one was definitely the most challenging. It seems like the staff member used a blue-magenta filter over the original selfie, which I had to balance out. I played around with color balance – focusing on making her face more neutral and avoiding too much blue-ish shadow in her hair. I was also able to cancel out some of the purple hues by using a yellow gradient filter over the image. The biggest challenge was not making the beautiful UT landscape behind the staff member so vibrant that it overpowers her, but I feel I was able to genuinely keep her the focal point.

This snazzy graduate student had a perfect photo!

I really love the composition and lighting over this image. The textured background really complements her outfit. The initial image was a bit dark and may be hard, especially since this individual is a staff member and the images are smaller when you are scrolling through. I was able to up the brightness while also keeping the contrast about the same.

Similar to the last COLA professional photo – I just up’d the saturation a bit. Looking back, I’m not entirely sure it was even necessary.

Another perfect photo!

This image doesn’t generally follow our guidelines (we usually prefer images to be centered) however the image was nice and showed his face well, so we decided to keep it. I up’d the contrast and saturation a bit to keep it in line with the other images.

This image was really nice, but a bit tricky to work with due to how low the exposure was. I ended up going back and forth quite a bit with how I wanted it to look. Now looking back, I do think I went a bit too light, but hopefully it still works for its purpose.

I am also currently working on a photo for one professor who had a very interesting photo where her hands are showing:

The hands really give a lot of character to the image, so I sent two versions over to Suloni and Valerie to look over. Suloni decided that the one showing her hands works better.

Which one do you prefer?

Psy Labs Banner

I am still continuing on the Psy Labs banner. Our client did not like the more realistic look that the hand details gave the original drafts, so I ended up scrapping all of the detail lines and using the paper cut-out style of graphics that is often used in advertising/UI/UX use.

Here are two separate versions that I created, one with colors and designs I personally liked, and one with the UT colors:

Our client will most likely prefer the bottom colors, but may want the shapes from the top version. However, I do like the top colors and feel they look a bit more mature.

Other projects I am working on:

• Last week I helped Suloni and Adrian organize and find some of our old course graphics and animations to show clients. This mostly involved me rendering out some stingers we had in our after effects files.
• I have begun working on my profile ID for our basecamp orientation.
• I am going to read through some instructions for a potential powerpoint project we are beginning.

Summer Weeks 3-4

I had a shorter week last week (because of the tie-dye event), so I decided to lump these two weeks together into one blog post. I begin working 20 hours this week, so a lot of my work will probably go by faster!

Psy Labs Banner

The main project I am working on is for the new Psy Labs banner. I picked up on where Cristina left off in mid-may, and have started a new design based on what our clients have requested.

Cristina’s last draft before she left looked like this:

Our client really liked the hand-holding with the smart watches and blue color scheme, but requested something closer to this composition:

They also requested I use imagery that represents their lab’s purpose (family, socializing, technology, data).

My first step was to keep this in mind and draft up a mockup with images I thought may fit inside the phones in the image. I used the reference photo and brought in some stock images:

My goal here was to show a variety of different types of families and communication with technology. The client liked the general setup, but felt that only having people in the images may be too congruent with the idea of social media, and not science. They requested we use some images of data or graphs as well – I will wait on receiving actual graphs from the clients, as we do not have any and do not want to inaccurately convey the type of data they work with at the lab.

Additionally, the client requested we:

• Show two hands holding – at least one that has a smart watch on
• Use hands of different sizes
• Use a specific color palette that they listed

Keeping this all in mind, I decided to start a draft of just the hands without any images within the actual phones or smart watches. Once the client is happy with the general composition, we can then focus on the secondary images.

I began by drafting a general idea in illustrator without focusing as much on using the correct colors, just trying to pin down the general feel:

Right after submitting this, I realized I wanted to make the “detail” lines on the shirts smaller to match the detail lines on the fingers. I also needed to implement the colors our client requested, and use some variation in the hand sizes:

After reviewing this, Suloni felt it would be good to have me implement a few more hands to convey perspective (and family!):

In this version, I also used a curve tool on some of the detail lines to make them more organic. After looking at this, Suloni and I decided the middle left hand looked a bit clunky compared to the others. I ended up renovating that one, and adding a few more details:

I ended up completely redoing the bottom of that hand, and adding more details overall (mainly nails). I sent it over to the client, and will update as we get feedback!

Wardrobe Powerpoint

My next major project was to create an editable powerpoint for LAITS to use as a brochure for professors’ wardrobe options. I began this in March, and picked it up again recently.

I pulled a collection of fitting images of individuals in business casual, and picked several different powerpoint template themes my supervisors to pick from:

My supervisors ultimately liked the first template the best. The title slide was approved as well, although I was requested to make a version of its background without the blur effect.

I then went on to create a version of the template with 2 models on each slide:

I believe this powerpoint will remain as an editable google slide where the text can be replaced over time. If there are any more changes made to this, I will update later on!

Hand Rigging Project

My final project I am beginning is an animation assignment by Tate. Currently, I am working on creating a hand rig in illustrator that can be used in after effects. I have never created my own hand rig before, so this was a very educational experience!

Here is the rig Tate sent me as a reference:

And here is the rig I am currently working on:

Currently, I’ve mapped out all of the pieces, and am now working on making anchor points for their movement (the circle things.) After that, I can import them into after effects and essentially animate hand however I would like. Tate recommended I try making the hand type, and I am also interested in seeing if I can get the hand to do a bit of a stretch motion. I will have more updates as I continue on this!

Summer Week 1: Posters and Cards

Hello! I would like to organize my blog more systematically, so I am going to start labelling them weekly as I go through the summer. It is not technically summer until June, but it is summer break and certainly feels like summer and definitely is summer in Texas. So for me, it is summer.

I took off the past week after my semester ended to decompress and also visit some of my relatives in Dallas. It was very strange and unnerving to not have things to do, but I liked it! On Friday, I am going to have my official graduation and then eventually my Canvas dashboard for UT will kick me out. Do they actually kick you out? I wonder when I am officially not a student anymore.

I came back yesterday to start my summer appointment. A good chunk of STAs are leaving today and tomorrow, so I am really glad I was able to come in today. Goodbye Abriella, Thuy, and Cristina! Also while this is late, goodbye to Ingrid and Sheryl as well. It’s going to be empty over the summer, but perhaps we will get some new STAs (I did convince a friend of mine to apply!)

Business Card Assignment

Assigned by: Bill Murphy and Suloni

Task: Re-design the LAITS Computer Service business cards to include the new chat service, and reformat some of the text.

The initial business card files from pre-COVID had been lost, so I ended up using a business card photoshop template to create new cards. Fortunately,  LAITS computer support already has its own set of logos, so I was able to base the new card off of this.

Here were the initial cards from pre-COVID:

And here is the draft I created in illustrator based on these:

Bill noted that he wanted the chat website to be on top in order to promote this feature above the others, so I switched them around:

And voila! The business card template was complete. I exported them as .pdfs – both individually and as a front and back. It was fun to work on something where I had to keep in mind printing parameters, as I generally only work on website materials.

Poster Assignment

Assigned by: Mike Heidenreich and Valerie

Task: Create posters for the UT 2022 Freshman Orientation video. These posters are based on actual movie or TV posters but replaced with Orientation Advisors and text that reflects UT values and community.

Sci-Fi Poster

The first poster I was assigned was to resemble a science-fiction movie poster. They decided on using one of the posters from Interstellar:

The first thing I had to do was integrate photos of the OAs into this poster. I did this by first selecting photos from the folder of options that I thought would fit the poster best and match the angles of Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway’s characters.

The next step was to crop out the green screen and then add a filter to them so they matched the illustrative posterized look of the original. To do this, I made a system of steps for the first image, and then did the same for the second:

1. Select > Color Range and use the eyedropper tool to get as much of the green out as possible
2. Magic Wand tool as much of the rest out as possible
3. Use the eraser to clean up edges and erase some of the green that the other two tools couldn’t get to (namely within hair strands and clothing folds.) Some of the hair strands were too complex to detangle the green out of, so I ultimately erased the strands entirely.
4. Used a bit of a hair-like paint brush tool to clean up the hair edges so they weren’t too unnatural
5. Remove all color saturation
6. Apply Filter > Filter Gallery > Cutout and adjust settings until the image looks posterized while still readable and flattering
7. Cropped the torsos roughly to where they would be in the final poster

Ultimately, they came out looking like this:

For the next part, I had to integrate them into the poster. The main thing here was using the stamp tool to erase segments of the original character’s space suits that stuck out from behind the OAs. I also had to remove a lot of the original imagery and space-ships to make things more clean, so I decided to add some extra space ship images from Interstellar as well as some other related effects. Here were some of the ships I added in:

I also took some of the lines from this alternative poster to replace some of the extra background space that seemed empty:

In order to better integrate the OAs with the bottom of the poster where the text would be, I also applied a field blur and a motion blur so that they slowly dissolve into the background color. I applied a color overlay over the whole image so that everything took on the same navy blue tint. The final result looked like this:

After making some changes to the text, it ended up like this:

This poster was incredibly fun to work on! I really relied so much on the stamp tool as well as gradient clipping masks and layers. Thank you whoever invented these.

Sit-Com Poster

For this poster, De’sha had already done a wonderful job photoshopping on OA’s face onto Mike from The Office. She also added in the text for the poster, and had everything set up in the .psd folder. I was tasked with replacing the people in the background of the image:

De’sha had already removed the guy in the center back, so my main goal was to replace the three remaining people with OAs. The original photos of the OAs had casual clothes, so we had to work with bodies from stock images of female business workers for the two people sitting who were male.

I referenced from these images:

I used the stamp tool to fix up the background and remove traces of the original people from the image. Additionally, since the skin tone of the OAs and the models didn’t match, I used color overlay to alter the color of the bodies. I also used some color overlay on everything to make them look more early 2000s greenish TV style.

It ended up looking like this. The most difficult one was definitely the OA in the far back with the blue shirt, as her face was blurrier than the body that fit with her. However, since she is in the back, the image still reads as proportionate. The OA on the right had a different lighting setup for her photo than the other two, so I tweaked some of the lighting on her face so that it was more similar to the others. Thank you so much Cristina for helping me with this!!

Also, Cristina and De’sha made lovely posters that y’all should definitely check out on their blogs!

These posters were a blast to make, and reminded me how much I enjoy photoshop. Hopefully I will be able to use it again in the future!

This next week I will be taking over some of the work handed off by Cristina for Psy Labs, completing an organization project for Maddy, and working on some animation for Tate. I will update my blog again with more progress as it comes!

Week of 5/2/22

It’s already May – insane. I’ll be officially done with my classes on Friday, and am graduating on the 20th. I’m going to take a week off next week to recuperate from the semester, and then beginning working my summer hours (20 hours a week.) I’ll be working here in the summer until July 29th. After that, I am going to move to Orlando to begin grad school.

This week has mostly involved a lot of new project prep as well as working on trainings. I am going to begin working on the STA Movie Poster assignment, where I will photoshop a poster to look like Interstellar’s poster.

Iconography Training

On Monday I completed the first drafts of the iconography training. They currently look like this:

Abriella has given me some really good feedback on these, so I will update my blog when I make more changes. Namely, I need to have more consistent detail line weight, and also center the “network” one more.

COLA Turtle Animation

On Friday, I had some technical issues with After Effects which I had to troubleshoot with Tate. Fortunately, I was able to figure out what the issue was, so hopefully it will not happen again. Additionally, I began more designs for the turtle characters. I intend to do a set of three for this next one, and have created the illustrator graphics for two of them.

For this one, I wanted to show an older character to convey that college is for everyone and you don’t have to be young to get a degree!

I gave this guy a handsome full beard and mustache. I think he looks quite distinguished (how turtles grow beards – or hair at all really, baffles me.)

I haven’t had the chance to make the vectors for the last one, but here is the sketch:

I thought including a ponytail would add some diversity to the hair styles used, and also will include a band-aid as a fun accessory. I feel she is quirky, and very much unlike the other turtles.

I am really enjoying designing these turtles and working on this animation project! I am very excited to see how the COLA graduation website will turn out once it is finalized. 🙂

More updates will come later in the week/early next week!