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Shanda Horm

Shanda Horm

October

November 13, 2025 By Shanda Horm

OCTOBER 2025

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— Final STA Pop Art Poster —

After many iterations, we finally reached a final design for the STA Pop Art Roster Poster!!

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— Summer Marketing Pre-Roll Animation —

My first group assignment in a while!! I’m excited to work alongside Kyra and Lila (again!!) on this project. We are to collaborate on creating an animation advertising summer classes offered at UT while emphasizing that this is something you can do without it impeding your summer.

Our first task was to create environments for different scenes. I was assigned work from home and office space environments. I was also tasked with creating an illustration for the UT tower.

Office

Work from Home: Kitchen Space

Tower

As the list of assets required for the pre-roll were getting finalized, we proceeded to create and rig the characters that will show up in the animation. I was tasked with two students and a boss character!

Character 1

Character 3

Boss Character

Overall, it’s nice work on an animation project again! As I get closer to graduating, it’s become prevalent to me what skills I want to be better at, animation being one of them. I look forward to seeing what the rest of this project has in store for me as I go into my final semester!

Filed Under: Fall 2025 – Spring 2026, We are STAs

September 2025

October 9, 2025 By Shanda Horm

SEPTEMBER 2025

— Roster Poster Continued —

I continued to work on the Fall 2025 STA Roster Poster. Many many more iterations were pumped out. At this point, I was also considering having the poster be horizontal after getting the exact number of STAs for the Fall.

Keith Haring Style:

Comic Style:

A prevalent struggle I had while iterating was finding ways to make the comic style poster just as strong as the Keith Haring one. De’sha and I continued to discuss and explore ways to put them on even footing.

— Zapoteco Book Cover —

I was tasked with creating a illustrative book cover for the Zapoteco Pressbook. The client requested an illustration highlighting significant animals such as the Alcaraván bird depicted below. Due to time constraints, I had to shortcut the bird illustration by applying a filter in photoshop over the original image to give it a hand drawn effect. The left is my first draft and the right is my final.


Filed Under: Fall 2025 – Spring 2026, We are STAs

SUMMER 2025

September 2, 2025 By Shanda Horm

SUMMER 2025

— Hecho En Texas —

This was the first project I worked on during the summer. I was tasked to create assets for a pressbook. It was a new type of project to me, but I found it similar to course graphics. (Still in progress during this time)

Logo Sketches:

Logo Vectorized:

Textbook Cover Iterations:

Section Banners:

— Course Graphics–

Canvas Homepage Banner and Dashboard for GOV310L:

Text edits to SOC302:

New graphics for ARH301 (Still in progress at this time):

Buttons:

Canvas Dashboard and Homepage:

Powerpoint Slides:

Ipad Overlay Options:

TA Backdrop:

— Roster Poster–

I was excited to be assigned another poster! The theme for my particular poster is Pop Art. Exploring different iterations was so fun- especially for the Keith Haring designs.

Comic Iterations:

Keith Haring Iterations:

Filed Under: Fall 2024 - Spring 2025, We are STAs

APRIL 2025

April 16, 2025 By Shanda Horm

APRIL 2025

— 2025 STA PRESENTATION —

This first half of this month was dedicated to the 2025 STA presentations- plenty of projects for the Design team! On top of my project for the event, I was chosen to present! I presented the IPE project alongside Lila with her talking about animation and me explaining the illustrations.

— Horizontal Presentation Poster —

I was tasked with making a single horizontal version of the posters I made earlier in the year for the video team to use in the presentation reel. This was challenging and took longer than I expected since the two posters couldn’t be put together seamlessly without editing. Regardless, I’m satisfied with the final result and was happy to see it on presentation day.

— COFA + COE Arts Integration Course Development —

In the last half of April, I began to work on the course graphics for TD 302 S Arts Integration for Multidisciplinary Connections.

I began working on the Canvas homepage banners. The client requested a total of 4 banners: 3 independent banners and 1 where the 3 banners come together seamlessly. I found this challenging since the client wanted to utilize photos of Nick Cave’s sound suits. These are very colorful and extravagant- so I had to not only ensure that I make 3 banners that come together cohesively, but also make sure the graphics don’t distract from the text.

Below are my first two passes where I explored the sound suit idea and an original graphic:

Some feedback I received:

  • Have the sound suits be a connected design. Try having a textured background that corresponds to each suit.
  • The professor wants to avoid the traditional mask and art motifs for theatre and visual arts respectively- so pursue the sound suit idea.

Here is my second pass with a couple of options:

Filed Under: Fall 2024 - Spring 2025, We are STAs

January 2025

March 12, 2025 By Shanda Horm

JANUARY 2025

— IPE PROJECT —

I finished a lot of the illustrations for the IPE project by this point, so I was tasked with other assignments related to this project. One of them was revamping some PowerPoint slides:

The request for the first two slides was to rearrange the information already on the slides. For the third one, I was asked to make an illustration with all the doctors together.

— 2025 STA PRESENTATION ROSTER POSTER(S) —

In the second half of the month, I was assigned my first poster (yay!). However, it turned out to be two posters as it would be a roster of all the STAs for the 2025 STA Presentations. I was a little intimidated at first, but knew I could reach out to De’sha if I needed any help! The poster(s) were going to draw inspiration from The Peanuts Movie.

The first big challenge was tackling the theater chairs. I decided to make them in Illustrator so I could easily resize them if needed. Initially, I left the chairs with flat colors and was going to shade them in Photoshop.

However, I decided that I would be giving myself extra work if I decided to shade and light each row of seats by hand. So I decided to use the gradient tool in Illustrator to simulate shadows. Before landing on my final iteration, I went back and forth between Photoshop and Illustrator multiple times to get the shadows to my liking.

Now, it was time to arrange the seats and put the STAs in!

Below is the final iteration I did for January and I will continue editing these posters in February. Through each iteration, I felt the least satisfied with the lighting. Yet, I believe I’ll feel better about it once I start editing the lighting of each STA.

Filed Under: Fall 2024 - Spring 2025, We are STAs

February 2025

March 12, 2025 By Shanda Horm

FEBRUARY 2025

— 2025 STA PRESENTATION ROSTER POSTER(S) —

I was still working on the STA Presentation Roster Poster(s) going into February. The due date for the project was the 28th. I was grateful that I got the overall foundation of the posters done so all that was left was making edits to lighting, text, and props to decorate the scene.

Regarding the props, I went back to Illustrator to create some popcorn buckets and a drink.

Here is the first iteration of the posters with the props:

— IPE PROJECT —

I was back to working on some IPE assignments this month! Lila updated me on some scenes that were required and I went ahead and worked on them:

I also worked on additional icons needed for the animations. I created a calendar, phone, and pill bottle:

Overall, I like being able to revisit this project! It’s fun making scenes or illustrations and I love being tested on what I’ve learned in Illustrator up until now.

— 2025 LAITS T-SHIRT MOCKUPS —

My last project for February was creating high-fidelity mockups for this year’s shirt. I was provided 6 sketches from the project team and would use those as a reference.

The first shirt was based on the classic disposable cup design. This design was simple to recreate and helped me discover the select-color range tool in Photoshop!

The second shirt is inspired by the classic “thank you” bag. This one was also easy to recreate and I discovered another feature in Photoshop! I learned there was an outline option for text and used that for the “LAITS” red outlines.

The third was another callback to a classic design with this one being inspired by the iconic NYC coffee cup design. This design was a bit more difficult to recreate since I couldn’t easily do it in Photoshop. I took the design into Illustrator and recreated the design there since I could manipulate the assets without losing quality.

The fourth was the most difficult for me to recreate! This one was inspired by the Nintendo DS version of Pictochat. It took a while for me to recreate the design in Illustrator and having to restrict it to two colors was an additional challenge. Despite that, this one turned out to be my personal favorite!

For the fifth design, I was tasked with simplifying the poster design for the shirt. I struggled the most in balancing the elements of the design and having the catchphrases on the shirt make sense without including all of the original ones. I ended up with two mockups for this design: One that is the simplest and another that has more of the elements from the original poster. Looking at these, I personally feel there is still a bit of balancing issues, but I still like them! (The slack turtle is adorable)

The sixth design I took into procreate to draw. This design was also difficult because of the 2 color limit; however, Leilani’s suggestion of changing my lineart to gray helped the design standout on the black shirt.

Filed Under: Fall 2024 - Spring 2025, We are STAs

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