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October

November 13, 2025 By Shanda Horm

OCTOBER 2025

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— Final STA Pop Art Poster —

After many iterations, we finally reached a final design for the STA Pop Art Roster Poster!!

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— Summer Marketing Pre-Roll Animation —

My first group assignment in a while!! I’m excited to work alongside Kyra and Lila (again!!) on this project. We are to collaborate on creating an animation advertising summer classes offered at UT while emphasizing that this is something you can do without it impeding your summer.

Our first task was to create environments for different scenes. I was assigned work from home and office space environments. I was also tasked with creating an illustration for the UT tower.

Office

Work from Home: Kitchen Space

Tower

As the list of assets required for the pre-roll were getting finalized, we proceeded to create and rig the characters that will show up in the animation. I was tasked with two students and a boss character!

Character 1

Character 3

Boss Character

Overall, it’s nice work on an animation project again! As I get closer to graduating, it’s become prevalent to me what skills I want to be better at, animation being one of them. I look forward to seeing what the rest of this project has in store for me as I go into my final semester!

Filed Under: Fall 2025 – Spring 2026, We are STAs

November 2025

November 13, 2025 By Kyra Lee

Summer Marketing Pre-roll Animation

Project Details

For this project, I am working with Lila and Shanda to create a 30 second animation that advertises UT’s Summer Online Courses. The animation will play before online courses held in the Spring. We decided that most of the animations will be done using the puppet tool in After Effects and that we will have one frame-by-frame animation at the end, since this is most time consuming.

Stage 1: Asset Creation

Character Designs

Our first step was to create all the assets, starting with characters. Lila found some base templates from Adobe Stock, and Shanda and I modified them to fit our needs. We added the dark outlines to the outside of the characters, and changed some of the clothingAbove are the five characters I edited.

Backgrounds

We also divided up the environments we were making. I was tasked with creating the park background that includes the Austin city skyline.

Putting Everything Together

The last step of the asset creation stage was to put the characters into the environments and prepare the Illustrator files for After Effects. This meant that each moveable element (character’s limbs, eyes, head, the dog’s tail, etc.) had to be on it’s own layer in Illustrator.

Stage 2: Frame-by-Frame Animation

While Lila and Shanda began the After Effects animations, I began working on the final call-to-action scene of the animation that shows the 3 main characters in front of the UT tower at graduation.

Here is the rough draft I created to establish timing:

And a cleaner version:

Next, I exported these frames as PNGs and moved them into Illustrator, where I can begin vectorizing each frame with the character models.

Filed Under: Fall 2025 – Spring 2026, We are STAs

November 6, 2025 By Tomas Marulanda-Mesa

Spring 2026 Roster Poster: Sprites!

This week, I worked on adding non-tag graffiti elements. I did a few fuller, bubble style graffitis as well as some sprites and small characters. For many of these, I found inspiration in my hometown of Medellin, which is absolutely full of graffiti. I found some of these characters on the areas located on the map below!

All of these are in downtown Medellin: the bottom circle near the government, the middle one near the famous Plaza Botero, and the top one in the neighborhood surrounding the University of Antioquia.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2025/11/06/55258/

Filed Under: Fall 2025 – Spring 2026, We are STAs

October 30, 2025 By Tomas Marulanda-Mesa

-Spring 2026 Roster Poster Changes-

This week, I went through and started making a new iteration of the Spring 2026 Roster Poster, with a different direction this time. This time around, I aimed at a more realistic, brick wall environment that seemed more textured and like a real wall with graffiti on it, instead of just textures.

This has allowed me to make the elements within the design much more grounded to the its environment, as seen especially on the title and the base for the STA portrait frames in black.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2025/10/30/55242/

Filed Under: Fall 2025 – Spring 2026, We are STAs

October 23, 2025 By Tomas Marulanda-Mesa

-Continuing Spring 2026 STA Roster Poster-

This past week I was able to make significant progress on the style of the Roster Poster, and am now experimenting with how do include various graffiti assets alongside the STA frames.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2025/10/23/55235/

Filed Under: Fall 2025 – Spring 2026, We are STAs

Fall 2025

October 17, 2025 By Nicholas Peasely

Summer 2025


Summer Marketing

Fall Digital Display

v.1

v.2

v.3

  • Identical to last years
  • Scene is Book’em on UT Campus…
  • Went for a full park scene. (campus imagery isn’t the best for summer promotions)
  • Flag poles and road referencing speedway
  • Changed placement of text
  • URL has separate designated place

11 x 17 Posters (WIP)

Continuing the campaign, my next was to redesign the 11×17 posters that will be posted around campus. This visual has gone through a lot of iterations, changing imagery, color, text, and many visual components.

v.1

v.2

v.105,784

FINAL POSTERS

Changes

  • Hard stop gradient background
  • Cleaned up photo: removed cup, background objects, and flyawayss

Overall I’m very happy with the poster! It was a struggle knowing what elements needed to be on the poster and in what order. I think this project really helped with my hierarchy skills and just developing as an intentional designer.

Fall A-Frames

Changes

  • Removed tagline bar at the top
  • Fixed spacing of words
  • Added “Future you will thank you!” to the computer screen. Adjusted the photo so the phrase is the focus.

Spring Digital Display

v.1

For this project the objective was to mimic the visual elements of the 11×17 poster, but oriented for a TV screen.

Components

  • Photo
  • Visual motif that shows movement
  • Tag line and URL

v.2

v.3

Finalish

  • Solidified 11×17 visuals
  • Thinner lines
  • Different photo options
  • Lighter background gradient

Filed Under: Fall 2025 – Spring 2026, We are STAs

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