STA Blog

Week 7

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Tockify Calendar Mockup

Client /Prof: Professor Grayson
completion status: Started on Oct 13
staff guidance: Maddy
STA team members: Thang
To be completed: TBD

Last week I worked more on the Tockify calendar mockup, the goal being to make a calendar that displays academic and religious holidays to spread awareness of holidays that faculty, students, or staff may be celebrating. Here is the calendar embedded again:

Alternatively, here is the link to the calendar on a more regular webpage view.

 

The above embedded might revert back to not being customized after the premium trial runs out in a few days, so further videos on what the calendar is meant to look like at this stage can be found here.

STA Trainings – History of Design

Completion Status: Started on Oct 20
Staff Guidance: Valerie
To be completed: TBD

I made a first draft of the history of design training, where I chose the Swiss style. I did this in Photoshop, and for the colors I used the “blending options” popup and edited the RGB settings. The full tutorial can be found here. 

 

….and then I also tried my hand at the STA blog banner, but I’m assuming we’re not meant to show progress on that to keep anonymity.

Week L

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Week L

Isn’t it weird that Roman numerals jump from XLIX to L? Why isn’t it IL for 49? I guess it’s to standardize the tens place. Anyways,

Fall 2022 STA Poster

As of writing, both of these are wrapped!

The video poster underwent some minor changes since last week – the strips have square holes now.

Project team went through many more iterations – about half of them within the last hour of crunch time Friday. Here’s a summarized chronology:

And the final cut:

Flyer GSD360 for Spring ’23

Project: Flyer GSD360 for Spring ’23
Client /Prof: Jette Gindner
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Maddy K, Suloni robertson
STA team members: N/A
description/plans: TBA
To be completed: TBA
This one’s exciting! My first real client graphics in a while: a flyer for a course on early German film, from the silent era to 1945. The idea so far is a grid of movie stills/posters, with one black rectangle for the course info, and then either slanting or rotating it. Not much to show… yet!

Week 6

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Week 6

Audio STA Poster (10/10 – 10/13)

Staff guidance: Maddie
STA team members: De’sha & Leilani

This past week was mostly dedicated to wrapping up the Audio STA poster. I loved the constant feedback and suggestions from other staff members (De’sha and Maddie) which helped improve the poster with every new draft. This is probably the most time I have ever spent working in Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator (exciting but definitely a learning curve).

1st draft & 2nd draft

 

3rd & 4th draft

 

Week 5

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Project: Exposure Therapy Lab

Started on: October 4, 2022

Completed on: October 6, 2022

Staff Guidance: Ruben, Marianne

Description: For this project, I was asked to complete different requirements as the client requested.

  1. Nest under home a page named Consortium Members
  2. Remove pending and current project. Just displayed Initiatives List.
  3. Move the gallery on the home page to a new page named Consortium Members
  4. On the home page, instead of gallery, display stats and summary over the members

Challenges: Along the way, I encountered some challenges including finding the location of different CSS, HTML files in the project, so that I can update the content accordingly. For the task of nesting a page under home page on the main menu, it was weird that I didn’t see the update even after I added a page and refreshed different things. I also googled and asked Ruben about it. At the end, I tinkered around and moved the home menu to different locations. The home menu displayed the dropdown after returning it back to its original location. It was kind of lucky. There are a lot of different things with Grav that make it hard to search online when I want to accomplish different objectives. For different languages and frameworks like Xcode and Swift, I can search online easily how to make different things but for Grav, it was harder.

 

Project: Monfils Lab

Started on: October 7, 2022

Completed on: October 7, 2022

Staff Guidance: Marianne

Description: For this project, I was tasked with updating the content for the website. I updated the Introduction and Land Acknowledgement on the home page. I also updated the people under Undergraduate Students/RAs.

 

 

 

Meeting for Project: Simile Database

Happened on: October 7, 2022

Description: This is my second meeting with clients. In the meeting, I saw beautiful work done by Marianne, Maddy, Valerie and other LAITS people involved in the project. I took notes for the meeting on things that we need to fix. It was another valuable learning experience since I can see the interactions between developers and real clients.

 

 

 

Week XLVIII

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Week XLVIII

UTFC – Green Screen: 5.4B Getting Around Town List

Same deal as last time – vocab list + Francophile city. This time, it was Tunis, and directions. Some of them were sort of abstract “nearby” so I kept it simple and tried to include cats.

Fall 2022 STA Poster

The big project this week. I started by arranging the photos all on one layout. This was tricky with 14 people, so I figured… a zigzag?

I wasn’t sure what to do from there, so I added some stripes to break it up, and a simple pink gradient overlay inspired by the lighting in the editing room. Also, a soccer field background pattern, to tie in the world cup theme..?

I got feedback to focus on the video theme, and not take the soccer thing ‘too literally’, so I went a new direction and replaced the stripes with a vintage film strip. I also used the palette of the film strip to give the rest of the poster a more vintagey color scheme.

Next was the team crest… I started this without guidelines and drew up a camera-shaped logo.

However, I wasn’t sure how it would fit well into the poster. The film strips didn’t leave much blank space, and I already had “VIDEO TEAM” on one stripe.

It was only after drawing this out that I got more guidelines and a specific template, based on soccer team logos.

I’m supposed to use green for the video team. I’m still experimenting with how I can reuse the camera graphic I drew, since I’m not sure what else to put in the crest.

STA Blog Caricature

One last thing: I drew this one last week but I just wanted to show it here. It’s an updated outfit from last semester.

 

Week 3

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Week 3

(9/21)

Boat Recolor

I was asked to recolor a boat.ai and boat.gif for Maddie and Marianne. There were three suggested colors, so I just made 3 versions of the boat (options!).

Recoloring them was pretty simple, and I also learned a bit more about Adobe After Effects in the process. Recoloring in AI was simple, but AE required some more digging, but in the end it came out very clean!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(9/13 – 9/20)

Design Fundamentals: History and Styles

This past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a basic training assignment in my spare time. I learned more about different historical art movements and was tasked with designing a graphic in my preferred movement. I chose Bauhaus because I liked the geometric shapes, and I recognize it from my past Art History courses. I first followed the Youtube tutorial link so that I would know how to create Bauhaus-like shapes and text. Then, I created my own graphic based on what I learned. I made it about the upcoming album release of one of my favorite artists, 5 Seconds of Summer. Although alongside the tutorial-based poster, mine appears more minimal, I think it contains just enough elements to be identifiable as derived from Bauhaus.