STA Blog

Tomas Marulanda-Mesa

Tomas Marulanda-Mesa

Fall 2026 Projects

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2027 Spring STA Roster Poster

In August, I began working on the 2027 Spring STA Roster Poster. With the theme being a video game menu or character select screen, I started looking for references and inspiration in games like Terraria, Mario Kart, and Smash Bros.

Creating a Background in Procreate

Going off of these inspirations, I went into Procreate and began sketching out my first concept background and assets, leaning more off of the Terraria pixel art style. I would continue with this art style for the majority of the project.

After completing these major assets, I began working out the rest of the background where the STAs and remaining design would take space. For this, I planned an updated layout and worked with the sections one by one, starting with the clouds in the far background, and the Austin downtown skyline in the middle ground.

Secondary Iteration & STA Frames

Now finalizing the background design, I imported all the assets into Illustrator and began working on the main layout design and STA frames. At the same time, I began working on a separate design with a different art style.

After working on these two designs, I created a separate layout of STA frames which I then applied onto my initial design.

After combining the background with the STA frames, I took more inspiration from an Overwatch character selected screen for a darker, more contrasting look to the poster. I also added details to the background like stars, lights of the buildings, and a “27” on the lights of the UT Tower.

LAITS T-Shirt Design 2026-2027

In late October, I began my work on the LAITS T-Shirt. The theme of this years shirt comes from the 1990s K-Nack 107.7 Radio Station bumper sticker design:

Since LAITS doesn’t have an official mascot or single visual theme which is unique to LAITS, I decided to make the main design surrounded by the word “LAITS” itself. Taking inspiration from the bumper sticker and various designs from the 1990s I found on Design Reviewed, I came up with the following first iteration.

March-April

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– Spring 2026 STA Presentation –

Lower Thirds

In March and April, I worked on the lower thirds for the Spring 2026 STA Presentation, and since the theme is museum related, my first iteration went in the direction of museum tickets.

However, we noticed that this design was quite similar to a previous lower third design which had a movie theater theme, with the lower thirds being the tickets, so we decided to change directions. We ended up on a paint brush design, where the brush is painting a stroke with the STA names and roles in it:

Final iterations and template creation:

After some testing of how the graphic looked on the samples, we decided to make a final adjustment to the color of the handle, and bring back the color to the LAITS logo.

– Tier 3 Course Graphics –

Course Intro

In early April I worked on some leftover Tier 3 trainings. In After Effects, I created a short looping intro for one of the previous Arabic courses I had taken.

January – February Projects

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-Spring 2026 Voting PSAs-

In January, I focused on making three separate designs for the Spring 2026 Voting PSA’s, Register to Vote, Early Voting, and Election Day.

Register to Vote PSA

Out of these two styles, I combined the two to make the background blue and the text red, leaving less white space. The hand was moved on top of the frame in order to convey the imagery of the hand dropping a ballot into the ballot box.

Finally, the hand was scrapped and replaced with a vector of multiple people with voting sheets. The text was right adjusted and a motif was established with the top bar of red, white, and blue stripes.

Early Voting PSA

This design went through the most iterations, starting with the first one which included a photo of two people showing their voting stickers. The second iteration replaced the image with a vector of a crowd walking over to a polling station.

Later, the hand was brought back, this time painted over and vectorized. “Skip the Lines” was also changed to “Cast an early”. In this iteration the striped motif was brought back in.

The final version added stars to fill in some of the empty blue space, and the informative text below “VOTE” was adjusted left. The stripes on the sides were also cut in half.

Election Day PSA

This design went through one continuous iteration with little major changes. In Photoshop, I created the main project file for the design, and used Illustrator for the voter sticker asset. Just like the previous two designs, I used the red, white, and blue stripes, and included the informative text on the bottom.

-COLA Texas German Dialect Project-

Starting in February, I picked up some of the banners for the Texas German Dialect Project

Word Order

Initially, the Word Order and Verb sections were combined into one single banner, however, there was too much information to cover to fit into one banner, so each of the two sections were split into their own single banner. We are still currently waiting on client feedback, as there is still a decent amount of white space to cover.

Verbs

This section is so far the one with the most information I’ve worked with, and we are still waiting on client feedback in order to see how we can condense the information in order to fit the length of the banner.

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Spring 2026 STA Roster Poster: Layout and Texturing

This past week has been all about layout and texturing. After making some graffiti assets which could be used as filler content and title work, I began to work on the formation of the STA frames.

What I quickly realized is how cluttered the image looked with the brick wall background, so instead, I switched back to the plain grey concrete wall in order to make names more readable and for texturing to be just a little bit more efficient.

After making more space for future STA’s, I will work on the department names and how to present them as part of the artwork as a whole.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2025/11/13/55292/

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Spring 2026 Roster Poster: Sprites!

This week, I worked on adding non-tag graffiti elements. I did a few fuller, bubble style graffitis as well as some sprites and small characters. For many of these, I found inspiration in my hometown of Medellin, which is absolutely full of graffiti. I found some of these characters on the areas located on the map below!

All of these are in downtown Medellin: the bottom circle near the government, the middle one near the famous Plaza Botero, and the top one in the neighborhood surrounding the University of Antioquia.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2025/11/06/55258/

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-Spring 2026 Roster Poster Changes-

This week, I went through and started making a new iteration of the Spring 2026 Roster Poster, with a different direction this time. This time around, I aimed at a more realistic, brick wall environment that seemed more textured and like a real wall with graffiti on it, instead of just textures.

This has allowed me to make the elements within the design much more grounded to the its environment, as seen especially on the title and the base for the STA portrait frames in black.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2025/10/30/55242/