New Course Graphics!

This week, I was assigned to make some course graphics for the Data Science for Health and Discovery class. It’s pretty simple stuff but it still had to go through some iterations. I got there in the end!

Iterations:

Final banners:

UTFC

Finding images for the UTFC textbook is actually going a lot smoother now! I think once I figured out how to communicate with Yasmina and not stress about finding pictures, it’s been a much better process. I’m currently still in the process of finding approved images, but sooner than later I’ll be able to work on the slides.

Logo Animation Training!

This training was a lot of tedious fun! It was solely tedious because it took me I’d say an hour total just to figure out masking properly and I had to put it on hold for a bit to work on other assignments.

I created an eye logo in Illustrator which was a good amount of trial and error. These were the main images I needed. Pretty simple stuff for illustrator.

I made it an eye logo because I like animating eyes a lot.

Next was exporting it into After Effects. I was not prepared for this.

So After Effects uses vectors differently. I’m not sure how it works, but the amount of paths the design had in illustrator changed in After Effects. I also had to keep in mind that while After Effects kept the same amount of layers in the design, it made every component editable so I had to be REALLY careful that I was editing the right thing.

To animate it blinking, I had to manually animated the vector paths. This wasn’t difficult, but I had to keep in mind that the animation wouldn’t look as clean as I wanted it too. That’s why the closed eye part looks very choppy/raggedy.

Masking took a while to figure out mainly because I wasn’t entirely sure where I wanted it to be. I needed one to cover up the pupil when the eye closes, so I had to think about what layer would work best for the mask.

Here’s the final animation! I’m pretty happy with how it looks as this is my first time doing logo animation.

Final Animation

Fall ’23 STA Roster Poster

Project: Fall 2023 STA Roster Poster
Client: LAITS
Completion Status: *Final touches*
Staff guidance: De’sha
STA team members: Leilani
Description/plans: Lots (and lots) of variations of how the QR code could be displayed. The triangle banners tie best with the theme so we changed the movement and colors on them to better suit each poster.

FINALS:

THAT’S A WRAP

Thank you to De’sha and Leilani for helping me with the STA Roster Poster! This project felt very ambitious so I had to learn to trust my judgment and decision-making skills. I also became very familiar with the Illustrator workspace during this project, which was a great benefit. I’m very thankful for the opportunity to work on this, and I hope everyone is happy with the results! I learned a lot from this experience but I know I still have much more to learn as a designer.

10/1 Group Meeting – Stress Management

This week De’sha talked to us about stress management– identifying the signs, behaviors, and remedies. We talked about how everyone is juggling different kinds and amounts of stress, even if we don’t visibly see it. At the end of the meeting, we made sticky notes with positive affirmations on them to put somewhere where we’ll see them every day.

STA Training: Logo Design

Start: Sep 27th, 2023

To be Completed: N/A

Description: This is a three-part training in branding and the first step is the creation of a logo to represent myself.

When I looked back to my portfolio site, I realized that most of my personal work in done in black and off-white with thin like and heavy text. Therefore, I’d like to make a monogram logo in a minimalism style. Here are some sketches with the combination of my initial: J & W. I realized that they can combine with each other by overlaying J and the left part of W.

Version 1 in illustrator

My logo meant to be abstract to showcase the aesthetics of my design work. However, I’m not sure if I want to go with an elegant and thin style or the strong stroke. The strong strike is bad in readability but create interesting negative space for me to input more design inside. That’s how I come up with my new versions.

Version 2 in illustrator

While De’sha pointed out that it’s hard to read J&W with the shape, I realized that I could emphasize my name inside the strokes. It’s especially useful when I put it in the business card or personal website.

Next Step

When I looked at more examples in self-branding, I saw a couple of designers use a branding kit to represent themselves instead of a single logo to deal with different scenario. I think this logo would be a good supplement on this kits rather than itself to represent “the whole me”. For next steps, I would work on another form of logotype following the similar aesthetics of this logotype.

TXDST Website Photo Editing

Start: Sep 29th, 2023

To be Completed: Nov 9th, 2023

Client: Rachel

Staff Guidance: De’sha

Project Description: graphic design/editing help for images that will be used in the Brazoria County section of the website

I edited most of them by adding the yellow blurred highlight on the top of intended pieces.

However, there are one pieces I found difficulty of dealing it.

2. Trace the letter by myself (I have traced the first line for comparison)

I’m still waiting for the feedback of these two versions and hopefully our client would love one of them.

New Update

The client do like the tracing option so I trace the letter one by one with the Wacom tablet. It’s a little bit time-consuming overall but now I know more about the type structure!

Update on Nov.6th

I received more photo editing request from our client Signe. I was able to edit 20 more photos on adjusting and highlighting certain parts of the photos (census records and maps) to help readers of the website locate on important information easier. 

More Animation Training and UTFC

Animation Training

More animation training! This week was motion design focused which I mainly had fun with because it made me use more after effects features and puppet animati0n.

The first assignment was to fix a “broken” file which was mainly just using masking and reordering the assets. I think the biggest challenge was waiting for it to render since it’s over a minute long. It’s also a rather slow paced video, but nonetheless, I had fun figuring out how to fix it!

Broken File Link

Next up was animating a banner and animating Illustrator assets! This was actually really interesting as I used the puppet pin tool to essentially create limbs and mesh for the banner. I think one of the main things I learned is that it’s really easy to lose track of the proportions of an asset when using the puppet tool so I had to be very cautious the animation didn’t look too unnatural.

Animated Banner Link

I had a lot of fun with this one since I got to work with premade assets with an already established style. I’m used to just working with my own art so I look forward to projects like this.

UTFC

I’ve actually heard about the UTFC assignment before and that’s it’s mainly finding photos for the textbook. It’s a rather straightforward and meditative assignment. Some of the words can be really similar so working around that or figuring out the main thing that differentiates the words. However, I look forward to the feedback I can get so I can see what I can look for in the future.