COLA Graduation Animation Graphics

Project Goal: Create/edit animated graphics for the COLA graduation website

Project Managers: Tate Gibson, Maddy Kaniewski

My current task: Create variants of the animated turtles Tate has already made

Currently, the turtles Tate sent me look like this:

The goal of my work was to create some variations on these designs – e.g. with hair, glasses, hjabs, accessories, etc. that could personalize the turtles a bit. We didn’t want to have them be stereotypical – such as jocks, nerds, etc. – but more just representative of the student body at UT. The first turtle I was assigned to create variants for was the pink turtle.

I first drafted up two ideas in procreate over screenshots of the turtles:

 

It was a lot of fun to see how to place the designs on the characters. For the hjab, I played around with having it go all the way to the turtle legs, before deciding it made more sense for it just to wrap around its head.

Once these got approved, I went in and made them in illustrator. I soon realized that while these designs are simple, the way I did the lines on the sketch was still a bit too complex for the art style – and the pen curve tool in illustrator. Especially for the first one, I had to cut down on some of the details in order for the hjab to actually register as a hjab. Eventually, they looked like this:

Once I got this approved, I inputted the first turtle into the after effects animation file to see how it would look. It turned out like this:

My next task will be to create some designs for the yellow turtle. I will update this as I make more!

Update – Here are some new designs I created today:

SOC 344 Summer Online Course Graphics

The other main project I worked on this past week is the course graphics for the SOC 344 course. This course is in style A and has no professor photo, so it was pretty straightforward to create it. The main thing I had to focus on here was making sure the title slides and canvas dashboard pages looked balance without the professor photo. Here’s how it ended up looking:

And the stingers:

 

I really enjoy working on course graphics, and hope to work on some more in the future!

 

Training: Brand Iconography

Finally, I’ve spent some of my down time working on this training I began in February. Currently, I am working on making some COLA-style icons in illustrator. Here are the ones I’ve made so far (I am going to update this later as I do more and get feedback.)

Updates: 4/13/22

Dana Center – Strategic Direction

Hello! I am currently waiting for more feedback on the second and third set of infographics. However, these are what they currently look like:

More updates on these soon!

Photo IDs

Last Wednesday, I began working on two sets of photo IDs for COLA. This was my first time doing an official Photo ID request, and it was a lot of fun! I really enjoy working on Photo IDs, as I love portraiture and it’s very satisfying for me to edit and recolor images.

Batch #1: 4 IDs

The first set went very smoothly. All of the images were very nice and had room to be cropped properly.

Erin Brantmayer: This graduate student’s image was very nice already, so the only thing I had to do was brighten it up a bit and add some contrast.

My edits:

Tamra Lawson Webb: This staff member had a lovely image. However, it was bit too warm for LAITS standard photos. To solve this, I color corrected with the auto-color tool, and then edited it from there. I also up’d the brightness and contrast so the highlights on their face didn’t appear as yellow.

My edit:

Adé Thomas: This staff member had a great image, but it was slightly pixelated image. However, the overall composition was very nice and the colors were fixable. It looked as if their photo had a slight filter to it, so my main task was removing the filter-like colors and give it a more natural feel.

My edit:

I wasn’t sure about the blue highlights on the side of their face, so I toyed a bit with the heal/patch brush as well as painting over it with their neutral skin color. I was consequently able to subdue the highlights quite a bit so the lighting looked more even.

Briana Lopez: This graduate student had a very cool image with a great background. I barely had to tweak it beyond just up’ing the contrast slightly.

My edit (can you tell the difference?):

It’s a shame a lot of the cool background got cropped off in the final profile picture!

Batch #2: 3 IDs

The second batch was a bit more tricky.

One of the images for Iopeka Casumbal-Salazar was absolutely perfect, and I didn’t have to process it at all:

I really like the warm lighting coming from the left side, as well as the low depth of field effect conveyed with the out-of-focus plants. It looks as if this was taken with a professional camera! (If it wasn’t – then iPhones are getting pretty good.)

The other two images I was sent had some issues, so I wasn’t able to use them, and am now waiting to receive replacement images.

For the first one, the image was cropped too close to their head, and they weren’t forward facing, so there was a lot of negative space:

The second had a lovely composition, but like the first, wasn’t forward facing:

There is another image of this professor online that does fit the guidelines, however the professor is not sure if they wish to use this image. I am waiting to see if they take another image that better fits the guidelines.

Other Projects I am beginning:

As the Dana Center is mostly wrapping up, I am beginning to work on an animation project for Tate Gibson. This project is in preparation for the COLA grad website. Additionally, I will be doing some course graphics for Maddy. I will update my blog accordingly when I have more progress on these!

 

 

Dana Center: Strategic Direction Updates – 4/6/22

This past week, I have primarily been working on editing the strategic direction infographics to fit both the client requests as well as keeping in mind design principles.

Graphic 1

After meeting last week, Suloni and I discussed better ways to convey all the information so that each section is balanced without being too busy. I came up with three versions that experimented with adding another color in it and reorganizing some ideas:

Ultimately, Suloni decided that the third one (where What We Do is on top and not on the side) may work the best. She requested for me to fix the bullet points so that are more center aligned. It ended up looking like this:

We have sent over this current version to the client, and will see what they think about it/what changes they want made.

Graphic 2

As per last week, the second graphic looked like this:

It didn’t quite match the new version of the the first graphic, so I have revised it to try and match the style better.

I will update this further once I get more feedback on this particular one. Currently I am thinking the “Areas of Work” could potentially be shortened but I am not sure.

Graphic 3

For the third graphic, I began by using image trace to on a previous version of the graphic to get basic silhouettes. I then edited the silhouettes to be more readable.

The original one looked like this:

In my rendition, I ended up redoing quite a bit of the children’s design to better fit the adults. Additionally, I resized them, as the children were initially proportionally too small compared to the adults.

 

The next step was to add the bottom text in (we have not received the top text yet). I spoke with Suloni about various ways to do this, and ended up deciding on two options:

The main difference between these two is the arrows on the top. Ultimately, we decided on using the arrows for now. My next step is to figure out how to implement color using the UT brand colors. My current draft looks like this:

I am not certain if have so much color may clash with the other two graphics. However, I do like how it feels like a colorful, educational piece. I went from red to blue to try and convey a sense of growth and maturity (especially since blue is often used to denote honor and stability). I will see what Suloni thinks and then move on from there!

Blog Banner Change

One of my recent projects was to edit the blog banner I created last September to reflect our current STAs. This entailed adding in our new STAs Hoa and Keshav, as well as removing some of the STAs that no longer work here/are on hiatus.

This new blog banner looks like this:

The main thing I had to focus on here was balancing it out with less STAs than before. Fortunately, both Hoa and Keshav had larger images which made it easier to keep things visually cohesive. I’ll be excited to see how we design our banner for Summer 2022!

Dana Center: Strategic Direction Infographics Updates 3/28/22

Hello! It’s almost April – wow.

The past few shifts, I have been working on making edits to the strategic direction infographics. I had sent over the first two prior to spring break, and received feedback last Wednesday that allowed me to begin making changes.

Infographic 1

The first infographic I sent over initially had these two versions:

Our clients preferred the orange one. They also requested a title, as well as several changes to the general structure of the infographic.  The current version I created based on these changes looks like this:

After speaking with Suloni and Maddy, we decided the graphic had quite a lot going on. Additionally, the sections are a bit hard to parse. We edited it further and currently it looks like this:

We also decided to add slight curves to the boxes to match the Dana Center website. I will update this further once more changes are made!

Infographic 2

The second infographic started out looking like this:

Much like the first infographic, the second one needed a title, as well as some changes in regards to general structure. The current draft looks like this:

We ultimately decided to edit this graphic to better match the first one, and so right now it looks like this:

We mostly changed the color and added rounded corners. I will post again once more changes are made!

AFR 320c Landmark Map

Welcome back from spring break! My first assignment is to create a landmark map for the AFR 320c course. My supervisors for this are Maddy Kaniewski and Elizabeth Camilletti.

Maddy and I decided for me to create this in Google Maps My Map creator. This would allow me to have direct access to the Google Maps locations, and the icons that they provide. It is also a suitable tool as you can embed it in other websites – in this case, we are embedding the map in Canvs.

My first draft looked like this in Canvas:

Both Elizabeth and Maddy felt the colors were too dark, and also wanted to see street names to better identify the locations. I played around with the templates offered by the software and came up with this:

The map is interactive, and when you click on an icon it shows you an image of the location as well as address if there is one:

You can also zoom in and out pretty much infinitely, making it easier to input quite a few landmarks:

This draft of the map was finalized, and will be used in the AFR 320c course!