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STA Posters and More

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This week’s and last week’s focus has been STA posters as we finished up the cut outs. I began finalizing my portion of the poster, and today I finally submitted the final files. I will show my process below of months worth of progress.

I was tasked with designing the poster for the classroom support STAs inspired by the “Guess Who?” board game. I decided to go straight into Illustrator and start designing.

Inspiration and references

First prototype. Students shown are placed as placeholders, they are not current classroom support STAs

My art director and I were happy with what I produced, however this was not the initial idea for the design. They wanted the game board to be displayed with the students as the game pieces. So, I recycled what I could (such as the title and background) and scrapped what I didn’t need to start a new version.

In hindsight, it was not a good idea for me to immediately start in Illustrator without sketching up a few different concepts and confirming with my director. In future projects, I will always produce several concept sketches before moving on to more details.

Second version

I liked the playfulness this version gave with the angled board and varying game pieces, I feel like it gave it a more natural feel. Unfortunately, this would not work for this group of STAs since there were between 15-20 students. So again, I recycled what I could and made another version.

Third version

I angled the board to face more forward and added several more game pieces. We were getting closer to where we wanted this poster to be. I tried to keep the playfulness and natural feel to the board, however I could not figure out how to line up the game pieces properly while using Illustrators 3D and bevel tool. So, for one last time, it was back to editing.

Final reference photo

Final design

We finally decided on changing the board to face head on. It would make organization and unifying much easier rather than worrying about getting an accurate perspective. Since I had to redo many things in this project, I’ve learned to keep designs simple until there has been confirmation to move on. It was a lot of repetative work, but I’m satisfied with the end result.

Collab Lab Display

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Collab Lab TV Display

Task: Design a series of slides for the Collab Lab TV for STA announcements and protocols. Each slide should have a distinct style, but as a whole deck, remain cohesive and consistent.

Status: In Progress

Visual Guidance

In order to begin this project, I started a Figjam board with Kate to establish existing brand systems and styles before designing the slide deck.

Moodboard, Sketches, First Drafts

I began creating a moodboard with ideas for different layouts, colors, and motifs we could use. Then, I sketched out a few ideas and created them on Illustrator. However, there was a bit of confusion in what the assignment was, so these were not used in future designs. Instead of creating a slide deck template, I needed to design a series of engaging announcement style graphics in slide format to be displayed on the Collab Lab TV.

New Direction

With this is mind, I created a few new sketches for the slides and created them on Illustrator. Although this was heading in the right directions, they were still too simplistic.

Evolution and Iterations

I evolved my designs after getting feedback from Kate and De’sha making them more illustrative and dynamic. With this new direction, I was able to inform the designs of the other slides.

Improved Designs and Client Requests

The designs below were changed based on feedback from De’sha. Specifically on consistency, correcting verbiage, and alignment.

These are changes I made based on the clients requests

Continuing Slide Drafts

Using the style of the first five designs, I began sketching and designing ideas for the rest of the display slides.

Final Designs

These slides were approved and placed into an editable PowerPoint presentation for the Visual Team

Reflection

Making this slide deck was a really fun process and I was able to put my illustration skills to the test. When I first began looking at color and branding inspiration, I didn’t think that the LAITS palette had enough fun colors. However, I quickly realized that there was more than enough and they still made visually appealing designs. It was a good challenge to keep everything within the LAITS brand. In the future, I look forward to working with other brand identities and making engaging designs despite the feeling of being limited.

Roster Poster Continuation

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Project Team and Lifecycle Team

Task: Complete the roster posters designs

Original Designers: Asha R. for Project Team and Sasha K. for Lifecycle

Status: Complete

Final Posters

Reference

The goal was to create a poster that visually resembled the board game box. When I received the posters, the main references I used were these two images.

Pre-existing Designs

Below are the designs that Asha and Sasha originally created. I worked with their files and eventually made changes based on feedback from Lila and De’sha.

Asha R.
Sasha K.

Project Team Iterations

We changed layout directions a few times due to the small number of people on the Project Team. For example, we decided not to have multiples of the STA’s. To accomodate for the new layout, we rearranged the elements on the page and I created new graphics to fit in the poster. We leaned into the original board game’s token pieces and the Project Team’s most used items.

Added “tokens” and other STA’s
Created more graphics to ground the poster

Lifecycle Team Iterations

This poster had a similar issue in that there were only three STA’s, but the poster was a bit busy. After messing with the original layout a few times, De’sha created a new file that was much simpler. I made adjustments to make it resemble the reference image more closely.

New layout shared with me by De’sha
Adjusted pathway and STA’s
Fixing STA positioning and changing shirt color

Final Designs

For the Project Team, we decided to simplify the design and add more tokens onto the board. This made the board more consistent and focused on the STA’s. Additionally, we added a few details such as GOV 312L, PSY 301, and the Canvas logo to connect the poster back to UT.

For the Life Cycle poster, we adjusted the placement of “The Life Cycle Team” and added an offset path to increase legibility. Insead of having the text across the board, this version balanced the weight of the car and the title.

Reflection

Coming onto this project midway through the process was a new experience for me, but will likely be how design jobs will be in the future. I think this was good practice for me to work with another person’s design, keep core elements, and continue improving it. At first it was a bit challenging to know what to change and what to keep, but with guidance from Lila and De’sha, I think these turned out well in the end. Overall, jumping into these posters was a fun and challenging experience and taught me how to push designs forward that weren’t mine to begin with.

October Recap – Isa

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⋆.˚˖࿔ LAITS Print Redesigns ⋆.˚˖࿔ ࣪

LAITS has been doing a revamp on some of the flyers around the office. They were looking to redesign this flyer on the front door of the admin office to direct people to the computer support lab.

I had some initial designs from last semester, but I came back into this project with a fresh set of eyes!

Kate was onboarded onto this project and helped give me a lot of feedback! I came up with the next poster and we decided to go more-so in this direction.

After establishing the direction (and keeping in mind that this needed to be the same style of graphic a the Ring Bell Poster) I went back to the drawing board, and I began sketching!

I came up with a LOT of variations….

We ended up going forward with the first poster (with the dark grey background) I focused on making the shapes in the background a rectangular shape and reduced the size of the “contact us” squares below for more margin.

We wanted to try to fit information inside the laptop, so I came up with a different graphic of the laptop, but facing forwards in order to accommodate the information. Once again, cane up with a lot of variations…

After this round, we narrowed down to one view. Next the grey felt too overbearing, so I narrowed it down so it only contains the LAITS logo and I also reduced the size of the laptop so it didn’t bleed off the page.

The final poster…

There was also the “Ring bell for assistance” flyer I was doing simultaneously. This had to match the style I ended up going with for the final poster above.

These were my first few iterations before I had a solid idea of the direction we were going in for the redesigns:

After I knew we were going for the geometric color-block kind of style for the computer support poster, I came up with the following iteration for the flyer, which did become the final:

⋆.˚˖࿔ Video Team Poster ⋆.˚˖࿔ ࣪

I was onboarded to this project after Sasha. She already had the background for the STA’s done, inspired by the board game Clue!

This is whereI picked up from:

I really wanted to photoshop some of the STA’s into the characters from Clue, and the very top of the image (“Classic Detective Game”) needed different words that related to the Video team.

After this iteration, I got the feedback that I needed to make the costumes stand out more. I also needed to make everyone look apart of the scene, not just put costumes on the 6 STA’s I decided to make into the characters.

I focused on making STA’s have at least one of the following:

  • Fun hat (Detective hat, flamboyant hat, paper’s boy hat, or fedora)
  • Monocle
  • Magnifying glass
  • Jewelry (necklace, bracelet)
  • Boa

After ensuring everyone had at least some additional items photoshopped onto them, this was my next iteration:

I needed to deepen some shadows and the sizes of some STA’s. Stuart (unfortunately) had to lose his jacket, so I changed his shirt to at least be the same kind of brown as his hat and I added pants onto Gabriella (aka I stretched her shorts down to be longer). I also needed to make Julianna’s boa a lighter color and tilt Scout’s hat to show more of her face.

After these iterations, here is the final poster (now printed!):

Mid-September Activities

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Hello, I’ll start where we left off last time. Last week, I was assigned to design the STA presentation poster. I was tasked to design a game show audience environment. After gathering my references, I concepted a few designs in Procreate. Because there are so many STAs, I had to make sure that there would be several spots to add in their photo cut outs.

Initial concepts

After speaking to my art director, we decided to go with the second design the student photos will likely be straight-on, which would possibly cause problems if we were to go with the first one. I cleaned up the design, added more seats, ad created several variations.

You may notice mistakes, such as backwards lettering. I focused on designing these as quickly as I could while still delivering the idea clearly enough for my director to understand.

This week I received feedback on these designs, and while the colors are a good choice, this design is too close to another one made previously by another designer. So my new task is to create concepts of another design, one that does not match another design already.

Week 3 – Isa

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🫐 Week 3 🫐

Summary

This week I have been working on a lot of internal LAITS projects!

Some of them I can’t get into here since they are a secret (teehee), but I can get into my progress with the Computer Flyer Poster!

Admin Office Computer Support Flyer

LoFi Sketches

I started messing around with the layout of the poster. I kept doing HiFin iterations, but I was advised to do soem sketches, so I went back to the basics.

These are some options I came up with! After getting some advice, I came up with more iterations:

Overall

This week has been pretty chill! I took my STA photos and have also been editing the background out of all of them still as they come in.