STA Blog

History SZB Posters

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History SZB Posters

I was assigned to help create posters documenting the life of George I. Sanchez for the SZB building. I was given pictures and text, which I was then to format on posters using Adobe InDesign. The process mainly consisted of cleaning up the photos in Photoshop (sometimes converting to grayscale, removing blemishes, and adjusting them so they weren’t skewed), getting all the elements onto the page, and then rearranging them to make sure that the text was not too overwhelming and that the images were big enough.

View the exhibit:

Save the Date

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Save the Date

The theme for STA Presentations this year was movie productions! The presentation poster was themed around “The Peanuts Movie” film poster, so Save the Date was to be similarly themed.

First Drafts

I decided to display the important information on a clapper board to keep with the movie theme. However, after doing that, the background looked really empty, so I added film strips behind it. I used the LAITS logo colors as the accent colors for my design.

Additionally, I came up with a secondary design because I felt that the colors on the clapper board may be unnecessary, and the black letters for the less important information (“Save the Date”, “College of Liberal Arts”) might be too bold. I also switched the order of the colored film strips in the background (and brightened them) to match the order they are in in the LAITS logo.

Lastly, I created an option with a different accent font choice. This is a font that matches the one on “The Peanuts Movie” poster, so I thought we may want to see what that looked like too.

This is an alternate design that I thought could work as well. I was also able to get the STA roles information in using this layout.

For style one, I received feedback to:

  • Add STA photos to the film strips with a color overlay
  • Replace “College of Liberal Arts” with the LAITS logo

For style two, I received feedback to:

  • Try and add more personality, as the black was a little overwhelming, and it wasn’t very dynamic
  • Rework the hierarchy/arrangement so that the date is more prominent
  • Add the LAITS logo

Second Drafts

For the first version, I added the STA cutouts to all the film strip rectangles because it looked a little odd to have some empty, even if they were covered with something in front. I also moved “Save the Date” to the slate because it became hard to read in the top left corner when I added the STA photos.

For the second version, I tried to add some movement by creating a new, curved film strip and tilting the film slate. I also added the date/time/location to the film strip because it was more prominent there and put the STA roles under the slate.

We decided to go with style 1, and I received feedback to:

  • reposition the STA photos so that they weren’t being blocked by the film slate
  • make the LAITS logo grayscale

Third draft

After adjusting the graphic according to the feedback I received, it ended up looking like this:

We then decided that there was too much white space in certain places, so we decided to use the more dynamic photos of STAs that were also used on the presentation poster. After deciding this, the graphic looked like this.

Final Thoughts

Overall, this assignment was a fun way for me to practice both my layout and graphic design skills. I don’t have as much practice with Illustrator, so making graphics for this assignment was a new and fun challenge. I’m also happy that we decided on adding the STAs inside the filmstrips—I think it’s a lot more visually interesting and unique. Here is the final design!

March (Thang Truong)

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Feb – March Update

Project: UT Instapoll

Started on: Feb 20, 2024

Staff Guidance: Chris Pittman

Description: In this project, I redesigned and implemented the look of the application. It looks much better now on the website, but I still need to work on getting this look onto the pdf. Currently, the pdf does not have the logo and every question appears on different page.

Before

After

PDF:

Project: Web Editor Help

Started on: Feb 24, 2024

Staff Guidance: Geoff Boyd

Description: This project involves designing a better retrieval system for the web editor of COLA website. The website serves staff member to search for information easily with the documentation in the database. There are a lot of steps involved with redesigning the retrieval step, starting with implementing the pgvector database, implementing sentence-transformers for converting text to embedding, storing these embeddings into the database and then using cosine similarity to match.

Currently, I have done the first step of establishing the pgvector database and input some fake data into it. The first stage takes me a lot of time to set up and transition into pgvector from sql. But it has been good for now. The next stage I am doing is how to make sentence embedding to convert text to vectors for me.

Feb 10 – 16

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Project: UT Instapoll

Started on: Jan 27th, 2024

Staff Guidance: Chris Pittman

Description: The aim of this project is to incorporate the PDF integration into UT Instapoll. This features help student to download all of the poll responses as a study guide for a test. The PDF study guide comprises all of the questions, answers and the correct answer choices.

This is the continuation of part 1. In part 2, I implemented the library to generate PDF, customize the PDF, let user download the PDF to their machines, design the PDF and implement it.

  • Implemented the library to generate PDF
  • Design Figma
  • Implement the design

(27-31) Thang Truong

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Project 1: Polls

Started on: Jan 27th, 2024

Staff Guidance: Chris Pittman

Description: The aim of this project is to incorporate the PDF integration into UT Instapoll. This features help student to download all of the poll responses as a study guide for a test. The PDF study guide comprises all of the questions, answers and the correct answer choices.

Documenting my thought process for this project. There will be two parts:

  1. Creating the route, the controller, the blade template.
  2. Transform the Blade Template into PDF

1. Create the route, the controller and the blade template:

Route: This step establishes the URL end point to let the user access to get the PDF. For this, I chose teacher/course/1/poll_pdf.

Controller: The controller part controls the logic of back-end behind this operation. It will get the polls from the database so that I can access the question, response and the correct answer choices.

Blade Template: The blade template displays the HTML with all of the poll responses and correct responses. The template for the PDF is still in consideration.

HTML Result: The result looks something like this.

2. Part 2 is still in progress

This part, I still need to integrate the library to get PDF integration working.

Project 2: Qualtrics-LTI

Started on: Jan 20th, 2024

Finished on: Jan 27th, 2024

Staff Guidance: Chris Pittman

Description: Adding key and value to facilitate the process of adding these values onto the page.