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:

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.

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.

MARCH 2025

— TYPE HIERARCHY IN INDESIGN —

In my downtime, I explored training in software that I didn’t have much experience in. Before doing this training, I only used InDesign once to create a more creative resume. It gave me a lot of trouble, so I used this opportunity to get more comfortable with this app.

For this training, I was to make a typography-only poster for a fake event. I’ll admit I had trouble balancing the elements of the poster and adjusted the type multiple times. I thought about decorating the poster with assets I would create in Illustrator, but I wanted to see what I could do with just InDesign.

Here is the result:

— PHOTOSHOP TRAINING —

This was a quick Photoshop training I did where I made flashcards:

Flowers (Khmer):

Created by Grafix Point from Noun Project

Created by Kristina Margaryan from Noun Project

Created by Made from Noun Project

Mushrooms (Malay):

Created by Rike from Noun Project

Created by DioRama from Noun Project

Created by Lars Melertoberens from Noun Project

Grass (Lao):

Created by arie from Noun Project

Created by Tere II from Noun Project

Created by Adrien Coquet from Noun Project

Trees (Thai):

Created by Gabriella from Noun Project

Created by rasendria from Noun Project

Created by ProSymbols from Noun Project

Bushes (French):

Created by madness stock from Noun Project

Created by Agung Pamuji from Noun Project

Created by wahab marhaban from Noun Project

— STA PRESENTATION WALK-IN ANIMATION —

Animation Proposal

Asset Creation

Working on the Animation

Problem 🙁

Unfortunately, I got news that someone else did a walk-in animation. I had to stop working on the project.

— 2025 LAITS SHIRT CONTINUED —

Final Design Picked!

The turtle design was picked! Now it was time to rearrange the assets and explore different color options.

Shirt Mock Ups

A note I got is to explore the idea of a pink or brown shirt– so I would experiment with different color palettes for those. I would also try out different shirt colors that I think would suit the shirt.

DECEMBER 2024

At the beginning of December, I was tasked with creating a logo for UT.AI marketing. I was a little surprised when I was assigned this since I never made a logo before and only recently began training for it in my downtime. However, with the consistent feedback from De’sha and Leilani, I know what to expect in the future if I’m assigned a logo design again!

Regarding the actual creation of the logo, it took many back and forths to find the direction for the logo. Here are my sketches:

The direction of these two sketches was going in the right place and I got approval to iterate them further:

Color Iterations:

Vectorized:

The second logo was favored the most. I was asked to do one last adjustment before it was sent to Mike:

Before going on winter break, I was assigned to work on some illustrations and icons for the IPE project! These icons and illustrations would be used in animations created by Lila.

I was on a bit of a time crunch since I only had 6 days of work before I was out for winter break. I began with making sketches for the icons. Here are the sketches I was able to do:

After creating these sketches, I was to focus on creating characters, environments, and scenes for Lila to animate.

Here is the final character lineup:

These are the final environments I made:

The last thing I did was get started on a couple of scenes that would be animated. These are the ones I managed to complete before my last shift ended for the semester:

When I went on break, De’sha finished up my end! I was happy to be assigned this project because it allowed me to see how I’ve grown in Illustrator. Overall, I look forward to getting projects like this one again in the future, but hopefully we won’t be on as much of a time crunch as this one!