Week 16

Project: TXGDP

Started on: Feb 7, 2022

Completed on: Feb 10, 2022

Staff Guidance: Maddy, and Stacy

Description: For this project, after completing Figma design, I am tasked with translating the design into the WordPress testimonial portion. There are a lot of things that I struggle to make the WordPress portion look like the design. For example, with the top three cards, I need to make one div on top of another div. Moreover, in the bottom cards, I need to make the picture on the same line with the name. This sounds easy but in WordPress, everything is divided into columns, and we need to specify how much space each column will take up. To translate into WordPress, I make it 50 50 and change the flex-grow for the picture and the name.

My figma design: 

My WordPress site 

https://tgdp.org/tgdp-testimonials-2-2/

 

Last Week, I also answered Jolene’s question about the link that directs the user to new tab instead of the one the user is in.

Week LXII

Yup, I’m center-aligning headers and embeds now.

TGDP Banner 5

A lot of progress here. This is actually the third official draft, just sent out yesterday, after grueling trial and error. Maddy suggested editing the county map, and moving the website blurb to one corner.

Note to self: always check for the plus signs of cut-off text in InDesign. I somehow miss 1 or 2 every draft.

Intermediate Training: Animate Simple Course Graphics

Remember this? Well, now I know what keyframes are!

Honestly, the technical side of Ae is smoother than I expected (at least the basics). What’s really tricky is actual composition. Animation is a really intricate science, and my first draft definitely doesn’t feel ‘right’ in terms of pacing and framing. I talked to Maddy about a blog post I saw which had some storyboarding tips from the Adventure Time artists.

It doesn’t help that I barely storyboarded this one, kinda just figuring out in Ae from the raw materials. I’d be very interested in playing with this kind of thing more and getting the hang of making stuff that feels smooth and balanced.

Week 5

Project: Qualtrics LTI Grade CSV Passback

 

Project: Qualtrics LTI Grade CSV Passback

Client/Prof: LAITS

Started on: February 6, 2023

Completion status: Still in progress

Staff guidance: Chris Pittman, Stacy Vlasits

Description/plans: Feature to download student responses as CSV file

 

This week I started working on my first project at LAITS. Qualtrics LTI is a tool that you might be familiar with if you’ve ever taken a survey or a quiz here at UT. LTIs are application meant to be use as learning and instruction tools, another well known one here at UT is Instapoll. For this project, I was assigned to add a feature for instructor to be able to retrieve a CSV (Comma Separated Values) of a student’s responses after taking a quiz.

 

Qualtrics LTI is built on Laravel PHP Framework which follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. What is all of this? All websites you access that allow you to store information just as a username and password, items in a cart, or make posts have a database and a server behind them. MVC is a layout most commonly used to facilitate the development of these websites. Model represents all of data- here it would be the information to be retrieved such as the student ID, grade, and timestamp. View is the user interface or everything you see and interact with on a website. The controller is what connects the model and the view and the part of the layout that I will add to include this feature.

 

Week 16

2023 STA Hiring Poster

Project: STA Hiring Poster
Client /Prof: LAITS
Completion status: TBD
Staff guidance: Maddy
Description/plans: On Feb 14, LAITS is having a ‘job fair’ in RLP as part of CoLA’s “Liberal Arts Week”.  This is to advertise the various student positions we have available in the department. My task was to make a 1-page flyer that can be handed out at the job fair (could also be potentially used at future events).

 

I had some very useful design guidance from Maddy during this process. My first draft was mainly setting up the general layout that Mike suggested. Afterward, Maddy helped me with inserting the LAITS colors and text formatting. It was very informative to hear and see some of the design methods that Maddy uses.

 

 

February 9, 2023

Progress made after meeting with Valerie:

• call to actions
• discussed having rounder shapes
• separating the departments and cleaning up the text
• making it less ‘web-site-y’

           

FINAL POSTER BY VALERIE:

First STA Meeting of Spring ’23

Our first meeting of Spring ’23 was much smaller than Fall’s :,) But it was nice to hear and see what everyone has been up to since Winter Break (feels like so long ago)! It’s always cool to see the graphics everyone has been making, especially if I’ve seen them around campus. I do miss the big meetings, but the smaller one was chill and intimate.

 

Week LXI

Top secret!

It was decided we could use a few more variants of this backdrop, which I made by variously rotating the gradient overlay and the pattern layer. As for swapping it out in After Effects, we all know how much Adobe likes to make simple actions intuitive and accessible, so it only took around an hour to figure out how to drag the files into the file panel and then alt-drag them into the layer panel.

TGDP Banner 5

Laying this out has still been pretty tricky. The blocks of text are pretty uneven, and chronology is important, so… This is one attempt at a zig-zag timeline, but it could use some more shapes to make that clear, maybe lines or arrows? And the background is still a placeholder.

Faculty Search Committee PPT Redesign

Project: Faculty Search Committee PPT Redesign
Client /Prof: Grayson Hunt
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Maddy K
STA team members: Lorena
description/plans: TBA
To be completed: TBA

From what I understand, we are redesigning the powerpoint for a presentation about grad school demographic data, and by we I mean Lorena, because I have not done much besides take notes so far. I may eventually be reformatting the data below into some kind of charts and graphs but the best direction for that has not been entirely clear. Watch this space…

Week 15

NTR 306 Instapoll Stinger

Project: NTR 306 Instapoll stinger
Client /Prof: Hockett-Cooper, Leidy
Completion status: January 30, 2023
Staff guidance: Julie Phillips & Maddy
Description/plans: Creating a new Instapoll stinger for NTR 306 that incorporates the color and text associated with the class.

 

 

UTFC Green Screen 8.1B (Meat, Seafood, & Dairy)

Project: UTFC Green Screen 8.1B
Completion status: February 2, 2023
Staff guidance: Yazz
Description/plans: I just had to make a few edits that Yazz gave after the winter break (deleting/changing out photos). We ended up having a freeze, so Yazz added the final edits and submitted it for approval.

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**We had a freeze the rest of the week so not much other work was done:(