STA Blog

Current Sta

Starting out!

By

Starting out

Hello world! I’m Maddy, and I’m in my fourth year of studying advertising. A little about me, I’m from DFW, I think all cats are queens, and I like to DJ for fun. I also have a good amount of experience in design (not to brag but I was commissioned for my first logo design in 6th grade… yes it was for my dad), which is what drew me to LAITS and being a design + coding STA in the first place.

 

This is about to be my third full week as an STA and I’m really enjoying it. Everyone has been so helpful and kind throughout my whole onboarding process and the work is enjoyable too.

 

The major project this summer is creating all 12 units of Vlabs interactives for the physical anthropology course. While I’m sure it’ll start getting tedious coloring in monkey bones all day, it’s been nice finding a good workflow and getting comfy with the Vlabs style guide.

 

Here’s a screenshot of one interactive:

 

 

 

This was another I made, which ended up being a couple hundred layers after creating the graph and all the interactive elements. It’s definitely like a puzzle remaking an interactive. I recreate each piece of the original, while thinking of small ways to improve its layout, as well as staying thoughtful of how the next person will have to animate it in Canvasser.

 

 

So far so good at LAITS! I’ll check in again soon.

 

Project: Virtual Labs
Client /Prof: UT Anthropology
Completion status: Started spring 2019
Staff guidance: Suloni Robertson
STA team members: Jaclyn Alford, Valerie Tran, Emily Park, Bridget, Chloe Kim, Olivia Wilczek, Abriella Corker
Description/plans: Move + update the Virtual Laboratory for Physical Anthropology from Flash to HTML
To be completed: End of summer 2019

STA Orientation

By

Dear Abriella!
During the later part of your STA Orientation Tuesday July 9, 2019,
you’ll design and upload your STA Blog banner to the STA blog.

FIRST STEP
Photoshop
Design and make your banner

a. Use the photoshop specs for your blog banner that i placed in your STA volume folder

b. Save your unmerged files back to your STA volume folder

SECOND STEP
WP
Log-in

Publishing Help Documentation/Instructions
Read this WP sites “Publishing Help” before you upload your banner.
STA publishing help:
* the publishing help is out of date, please take a moment and make suggestions for reformatting & re-writing the instructions, on a comment in bascamp
Blog post
Reflect on the day. You blog posts will be a written experience with images, of your time as an STA with LAITS.
Write a bit about your about your-self, & what you did during orientation & upload your banner.

ABOUT IMAGES
Do not merely copy paste images in to your blog. Always upload images into the “Media” section of blog first, and then set the image from the media folder to display on your blog.
Don’t use the thumbnail version of your images.
Use images that are 72 dpi
Screen shots are fine
Images that are 780 pix wide format nicely above or below text blocks

ABOUT CATEGORIES
Check the “2018 Fall – 2019 Spring” Category box for all the blog posts you make this semester and next semester so that all of your work is documented in the correct semesters.

Zoom Category.jpg
Category.jpg 72.9 KB View full-size Download
LASTLY
Comment on Basecamp
Notification comments: etiquette, files, questions, feedback
Let Chloe and Valerie know you’ve completed this task.
Do this by uploading a link from your blog, to a comment on basecamp, and for your basecamp comments in general:
  • *Always address the person(s) you are writing to by their names.
  • *Always use complete sentences.
  • *Always add links or paths to your design file residing in your STA folder
  • *and a courtesy to your collaborators and mentors, add a screen shot to your comment, of the file you are asking for feedback on.
For this activity, use “@” Valerie and “@”Chloe on your bascamp comment, to let them know any questions you may have about the mechanics of using the STA blog, about the mechanics of photoshop, and to let them know that you have completed this task and that you would like a little feedback on on your banner design 🙂

Thank you & have fun!

Hi Maddy! :-) ready to blog??

By

Dear Maddy 🙂 i*** finally*** have your blog space ready.

Before you start work on VLabs, please upload the STA banner that you designed for your STA Blog here & and write for us a brief note of your experience as an STA so far.

WP

Log-in

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/wp-admin

Read Publishing Help Documentation/Instructions 

Read our “Publishing Help” before you upload your banner. Click on each of these links and read the STA publishing help. The help is out of date! i would appreciate your feedback on updating the instructions. Please let me know when you are ready to talk to me about it.

 

ABOUT IMAGES

Do not merely copy paste images in to your blog. Always upload images into the “Media” section of blog first, and then set the image from the media folder to display on your blog.

Don’t use the thumbnail version of your images.

Use images that are 72 dpi

screen shots are fine

images that are 780 pix wide format nicely above or below text blocks

ABOUT CATEGORIES

Check the “2018 Fall – 2019 Spring” Category box for all the blog posts you make this summer so that all of your work is documented in the correct semesters.

LASTLY Comment on Basecamp

Let us know you’ve completed this task, on basecamp.

Upload a link to this blog, on your base camp to-do:

https://3.basecamp.com/4001554/buckets/7892081/todos/1547763221

 

Thank you Maddy:-)

Duo Last Day post

By

Last day post ✧⁺⸜(●˙▾˙●)⸝⁺✧

Hellwowow guys~ It has truly been a wonderful experience working as an STA, and I have really enjoyed my time here. Suloni has been such a great supervisor and a friend to me; thank you so much for helping me throughout my time here! I looked forward to work every day because of the great people and the friendly work environment I found here. Because of you all, VLabs has been a great experience for me. I will miss everyone here dearly, and I hope we can see each other again soon!

Moving forward, I will continue pursuing my career in design with Hypergiant this summer in Austin! Let me know if you guys want to hang out this summer because I will still be around~

Thank you guys for everything.

 

Cheers,

Duo

Web Services Rebuild

By

LAITS! Web Services! Rebuild! Done??

Hey guys :’) it’s been a bit! Coming back from winter break I quickly realized that this semester was going to be wayyy different from last semester. With school getting harder (MIS I’m looking at you) & just general life I realized I had to cut back on my STA hours! So, since I’m working less, I’m just now finishing up the project that I’ve been working on this semester. I was tasked with redesigning & rebuilding the LAITS Web Services page & now I’m finally done!

 

Check it out!

 

It looks SO different from the original (see a couple blog posts ago!!), I’m in shock. I took a video of the page updating when we published the production page for my one second of the day today. Tim found it amusing. 🙂

Advanced Cascade Tutorial

By

Advanced Cascade Tutorial

Suloni asked me to create an “Advanced Cascade Tutorial” on the Knowledge Base since I’ve been doing a lot of Cascade stuff recently. She asked me to start with a tutorial on creating tables! You can check out the tutorial here, but here’s some screenshots.