Today was my first day with LAITS! It was super cool to meet all my new coworkers (even though we’re all working from home). We each created a PowerPoint with information from our work handbook and here are my (badly cropped) screenshots:

If you’re wondering, I got the color scheme from this generator and the cute doodles from this open-source site. I didn’t use a template, so this is just the default PowerPoint layouts with my embellishments added.

I worked on updating the layout for the photo ID guide. I have implemented a layout similar to the ‘Example Projects and Information’ section from the Podcasting site.

I also worked on adding a few points from the latest design brief. Below is an image of the updated photo ID guide:

I am continuing to work on the web responsive changes for the Enhancing French Skills website when I am not occupied with other tasks. After adding the viewport tag, I had to make some changes to adjust the positioning of the elements to make the site responsive to smaller screen sizes. Although the site is in better shape after a few changes, there are more changes required to make for the site function well across all the screen sizes.

Changes are required to align the site description, fix the issue with multiple columns being cut off on the theme page. I am working on fixing these issues and testing the changes across different pages.

Worked on the draft for the new page in the LAH site with a brief description and a link to the Dedman WordPress site and published the changes after confirmation from the client.

 

STA Handbook

While prepping for summer orientation, I revamped the STA Handbook design. Since it’s one of the first documents a new STA sees, it deserves some love. It is designed to look like a composition book, full of hand-drawn doodles. Since all STAs are students, I thought this would be a cute and relatable theme and maybe make them feel some common ground with new coworkers.

 

I designed it in Google Slides so it’s extremely easy for team leads to edit in the future.

 

Sexing History Lesson Plans

Since my last post I have started working full time, mostly helping plan orientation for our new summer hires. There is a lot to prep training ~8 new STAs remotely but I’m excited to meet them and get started!

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Other than that, I have been designing lesson plans for Sexing History, a podcast unearthing facts about sex and sexuality from the past. They want to offer lesson plans for teachers to teach in tandem with the podcast.

 

I wanted my design to reflect their brand, which utilizes a lot of vintage imagery. So, I opted for a serif font (Garamond) and some detailed page borders/lines to make it look more “traditional.” Still, it needed to be scannable and easy to read, so I split it into two columns and created a system that bolds sources and tools when they are listed in-text. I could imagine a teacher printing this out and wanting to leave notes to them-self while teaching, so left big blank margins for them to do so. I did this work in InDesign and got a lot use out of its rulers and guides feature.

 

 

It is always tricky to lay out large blocks of provided text in a cohesive way, which is most evident on pages 4 and 5. When having to make tough cut-off decisions I opted to keep ideas together over visual design since the document is for practical use, and it being nicely designed is a perk, not necessary for teaching.