Recent Projects

This week, I was given some new projects to work on that I’m excited to report on!

GOV310L Course Graphics

Recently, we were given some feedback on previous course graphics (made by previous STA Marissa) that were delivered and I was asked to make the edits. The first asset I would like to show are the requested stingers! I had a lot of fun with these and I made a few alterations.

Using some Adobe Stock templates, I was able to get these done relatively quickly.

I also made some new backdrops which was mainly to replace the background image.

That’s all for now!

2025 UT Summer Orientation film

Starting the summer off strong with a really cool big project known as the Summer orientation film! I’m excited for this as I love doing animated graphics and I’m excited to see how this project will look. Here are some of the assets I’ve been asked to work on.

I was also asked to make a title card animation.

As well as some lower thirds.

I have been having a lot of fun with these 😀 I’m thinking of making edits to the title card as I look at other scrapbook animation examples. I wanna play around with it!

Farewell! :’)

AHHHH! This position completely changed the trajectory of my career journey for the better. I’ll always be so grateful to Valerie, Maddy, and Suloni for taking a chance on me (a fine artist with absolutely no professional training or experience in graphic design). I also want to thank De’sha for being a mentor to me since I joined the Design team. I am so much more confident in my capabilities and skills because of all of them. Leilani was also a huge inspiration to me, and I’m thankful for her mentorship and help as I grew into the role–she was always someone I could go to and ask a second opinion from.

To all the current and future design STAs — trust in yourself that you are very capable and have so much potential. It’s hard to see in the moment, but with every project and training exercise, your design skills are growing exponentially. <3

– Marissa

Documenting Summer Marketing

Animated Reel:

This was my first time really creating something in After Effects from scratch (that wasn’t for training). I started with some sketches De’sha and I made– which were crucial in the initial steps of building out each animated segment. (Note: I also copied the style of our pre-existing animated pre-roll)

I created the elements in a way that would allow them to be animated (ex: tassle was separate from the cap, individual dollar bills, etc.) There was a lot of back and forth between Illustrator and After Effects to make sure certain elements were suitable to be animated.

After the elements were built out, I began animating. I think in the future it would be wiser to finalize the transitions between each segment and then individually animate, but whatever process is easiest and most efficient for you is probably fine. I would save the masking of text and certain elements towards the end, once you have the transitions and smaller animations of elements done.

Tips:

• Think of creating a ‘pre-composition’ in the main Comp 1 panel as similar to creating a ‘group’ in Illustrator and Photoshop. Select a group of elements and right click -> Pre-compose… -> Enter a New composition name and click ‘OK’. Then, double click on your Pre-comp to see the individual files within it and apply edits.
• I essentially made each segment into its own composition (Top 3 Reasons, Get ahead, Affordability/Save Money, Be Anywhere, Summer logo)

• Applying Easy Ease/Ease in/Ease out can help objects appear to move more smoothly. Select your keyframes -> right click on the keyframes -> Keyframe assistant -> ‘Easy Ease’

• To create a loop, hold the option key and click on the time clock next to the transformation (position, rotation, etc.) -> click where it says “transform.position” and type/replace with loopOut(). Then all of the keyframes in the transformation should loop infinitely, and you can make adjustments as needed.

Summer Marketing Social Media:

These are all of the posts I’ve created or helped work on since my last blog update. There are also a couple of stories I helped create between these posts as well. I think my favorites so far have been the bulletin board ones, as they feel real, personal, and have lots of small fun details.

LAITS Admin UTDirect Wordmark

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For this project, I was tasked to create section titles for the phrases, “COLA Purchasing” and “COLA Faculty Courseload” to replace where the blue rectangle is hovering over!

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I made some few drafts but was given feedback in setting the ratio of the titles through a max height! Above shows the visual demonstration given by De’sha!

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Finally, I corrected the borders of the titles and it was off to be sent to the client!

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E316L Intro to British Literature

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Next I was tasked to recreate canvas homepage and dashboard banners for E316L! I was given instructions to keep a similar color scheme as the buttons and to keep the same images from above!

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For my first draft, I focused too much on creating focus on one particular building, I forgot to inlcude the three others! However, I did like the gradient in the background but it was back to the drawing board!

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Next, I decided to keep the gradient background, but added the rest of the images to the side! Initially, I wanted to keep the color scheme at the forefront but with some feedback from De’sha, we decided to switch it up!

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We decided to make the pictures the forefront and decrease the opacity to make sure the title of the course was still readable! I thought since two of the images were more horizontal I could layer those two on top of each other in the middle and have the more vertical images on the side.

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With some feedback from De’sha, we decided to make all the images into columns and I think it turned out great! I’m still getting the hand of custom canvas layouts but it was fun going back and seeing my process!

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8-Bit Style Animated Gif

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One of the most fun trainings I did this month was create my very own GIF! I based it off my art logo again and wanted to show the switch from happy to sad with the ears and the face! I’m so happy with how it turned out!