STA Blog

Week 9

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STA Roster Poster Spring 2024

Client/Prof: LAITS
Completion Status: Started on Jan 23
Staff Guidance: De’sha
Completed on: March 20

Since my last post we totally changed our approach to this project. We wanted to take a more physical-object post, so eventually a drawstring backpack with STA buttons at a carnival was chosen.

 

And that’s a wrap on the 2024 STA roster poster!

Week 5

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Week at a Glance

This week, I worked through the UTFC banners I was assigned, the Shape and Pattern Training module, and How to Manipulate Shapes training module.

UTFC Banners

Programs: Illustrator
Mentor: De’sha Bass-McClellan

I was assigned to the 10.3 Gatineau/Ottawa border and 9.6 Les îles Sous le Vent dans l’archipel de la Société Lingco Banners. After review throughout the week, both were approved and completed in Basecamp.

 

9.6 Les îles Sous le Vent dans l’archipel de la Société 

 

10.3 Gatineau/Ottawa Border

Shapes and Pattern Training

In this module, I learned about the effect that shapes can have on conveying a certain meaning about the design. Following the KB training, I was introduced to geometric vs organic shapes, shape psychology, Gestalt theory, and visual hierarchy.

The first part of this assignment included creating shapes based on their “personality”.

Free and at peace. This shape has just come back from vacation.
Powerful and confident. This shape has just been promoted.
Energetic and active. This shape just wants to go to the gym.

 

 

Following an introduction to theme and personality, I worked on an assignment that related to visual hierarchy.

 

 

 

 

The tutorial also covered making a pattern and creating organic shapes using pathfinder and the curve tool.

 

 

 

How to Manipulate Shapes

 

In this training module I learned to transform shapes, and better take advantage of Ai tools that create complex shapes.

 

Spring 2024 Week 6

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STA Roster Poster Spring 2024

Client/Prof: LAITS
Completion Status: Started on Jan 23
Staff Guidance: De’sha

Last week I was going back and forth on how to proceed, which yielded this pretty crazy draft:

And then De’sha put forward this idea, which is meant to feel more cohesive:

So I’ll be working more on that in the days coming up!

Texas German Retractable Banner #11

Client/Prof: Margaret Blevins
Completion Status: Started on Feb 20
Staff Guidance: De’sha

Started on a new TGDP banner! This one is about Texas Germans and the Inter-War Period. Below is the first draft I finished, and in the next drafts I hope to edit things to look more balanced (especially at the last section).

STA Blog Banner Updates!!

Completion Status: Started on Feb 15
Completed on: Feb 20

Updated our blog banner with caricatures from our new STAs, Raaga, Diya, and Shriya!

Week 35 – Thang Truong

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Week 35: AI is taking over

Project: Whisper AI

Started on:  Feb 19, 2023

Staff Guidance: Chris

Description: This is a very interesting project where I need to dive into the world of AI and text-to-sound capabilities of AI’s model. The main task of this project comprises of exploring different values for a parameter of the Whisper AI model, especially the hallucination silence threshold. This parameters sets out the time limit for when the model can seek past that duration and reprocess at that point after it encounters moments of silence. Therefore, in this project, I need to loop over different parameters and examine the quality of the output in terms of text and the time it takes to output. If at some values of the threshold that we can see improvement in the time and significant changes in the text output, then we can conclude we have found the value that optimizes the model and give us the best result.

 

Step by Step tutorials

  • 1) Install Open AI Whisper AI
  • 2) Write out a function to extract 10 minutes of the videos
  • 3) Write out a function to utilize the Whisper AI model to transcribe the video
  • 4) Capture and export the text of the generated caption into a text file

 

Shriya – Week 2/12 – 2/16

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UTFC Banners: 10.1 Québec & 9.5 Port Villa

START: Feb 7, 2024 

COMPLETED BY: Feb 14th, 2024

DESCRIPTION: This week I was tasked with creating UTFC Banners for two different units. 
 
10.1 Québec 
Step 1. Images Cutout
For this section I started with these three images and used photoshop to erase the background.
  
From here I put the cutout images into Illustrator and used the image trace feature 
to create vectors of each of the images. 
  
Once I had image traced versions of these photos I created a layout that would compliment 
the banner text and center Tex & Tammy.
 
 
  
  
  

9.5 Port Villa
I repeated the same process for Port Villa to get this final result:
  
 
  
   

WHAT I LEARNED:
Through this process I learned a lot about being very attentive to detail. 
Going through multiple rounds of feedback and iteration for these banners, I was able to learn the expectations for these projects and how to apply them properly.

Week 2 & 3 & 4

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Week 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 Recap:

Week 1&2 of my STA Journey:

  • I Became familiar with various tools used in day-to-day work.
  • Created a personalized banner for the blog
  • Started assigned training modules.
  • Completed my Web Accessibility Standards Training
  • Discovered the significance of building accessible websites.
  • Realized the importance of inclusivity and providing alternate formats of information.
  • Learned about Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools, such as Wave, for analyzing websites for compliance with accessibility laws.
  • Utilized Figma to correct errors flagged by wave accessibility tools.

Wave Accessibility tool Logo 

Wave Accessibility Tool 

Errors detected by Wave Evaluation Tool

Errors detected when I analyzed Byjus.com

In Week 3&4 of my STA Journey:

I built my first website using WordPress. The website taught beginners to use WordPress. Let me walk you through the various phases here!

 

Phase 0) Brainstorming

Before building my website, I drew a rough sketch on my notes app. At this point I asked De’sha for feedback regarding my rough plan and learned more about menu icons in the realm of website. As a digital native, I am sure we must have come across the menu bar  (three horizontal lines stacked on top of each other). I learned that the menu bar was called a hamburger and there’s a whole suite of names for the different icons used in WebDesign. I found this information really interesting and wanted to share it with the readers of the blog!

List of Names for Menu Icons in Web-Design

Menu Icons

 

My Brainstorm Process

BrainStorm Process 

Phase 1) Implementation

While no one likes to face problems, I believe that the best way to learn is through consistently failing. Here, I will list all of my mistakes and what I learned from them.

 

  1. Implementation is hard but doable if you persevere. Initially, I had no idea what themes were and I kept switching out themes to build my project. This created a couple issues because I was not able to locally customize certain things as the local customization did’t have precedence over the pre-built theme customization. It was mid-project that I learned from a colleague that Astra is really powerful theme for customization purposes, so I stuck to that. Lesson: Don’t keep changing themes in WordPress
  2. The global customization theme is your BestFriend! Starting off, I was unsure of utilizing global headers and global footers so I would spend a lot of time, individually customizing my global headers and footer for each page. The main problems with this implementation was 1) The headers and footers were not consistent across the pages and 2) A lot of time had to be spent in making these features consistent across pages.  Lesson: Master Global features.
  3. Another issue I had was implementing the menu bars. Before I built my website, I knew that I needed a navigation bar. So naturally, making that part work was very important to me. However, I was just not able to get the hamburger to show up. It was so frustrating. I watched Youtube Tutorials, spent a lot of time tinkering with WordPress only to conclude that perhaps Astra does not support Menu icons.  Lesson: Don’t axe your vision because it does not seem to work at first. 
  4. When in doubt, ask for help. This step is super important. After being frustrated at not being able to implement certain features, I asked for help from my Web-Dev supervisor. So we spent about an hour on a call where he explained how to go about implementing menu bars and sub-menus, thinking about Global features, overwriting of certain features, and increasing responsiveness of the website. Lesson: Try everything before you ask for help. That way you are prepared to learn the most. 

 

Phase 2) Feedback

I asked around for feedback. For me, this is one of the most exciting phases of building anything. I get a sense of what is working and what is not. I am also able to step out of my capacity as a creator of the project and criticize some of my own choices which pushes me to improve what I build.

 

  • Here’s a list some of the feedback I got:
  1. Improve your about me page.
  2. Have a banner for your landing page because it is the first thing people see and it is important to make it as catchy as possible.
  3. Have some sort of color palette.
  4. Keep your fonts consistent.
  5. Explore word hierarchy.
  6. Utilize horizontal scroll.

 

Phase 3) Repeat implementation

  • I incorporated different suggestions to make my website look attractive.
  • I decided to distinguish my website from other websites by turning the highlighted portion green.
  • I also made a menu with sub-menu and rounded the edges of them to make it more inviting for learners.
  • I was not able to explore utilizing horizontal scroll, but I will keep that in mind to implement in future websites.
  • I was able to build a uniform header and footer for my website.
  • I also implemented features that improved the responsiveness of the website.

 

Final Product! 

& drum-roll! I have been talking about my project through the entire blog without showing you my final product. So, here’s my first ever website! Enjoy 🙂

Link to Website