Today, March 25th marks my first week of working as an STA. I am very excited and thankful for having this opportunity to work and contribute to the LAITS team.  I gained a lot of valuable information about STA, LAITS during the orientation. It was a really good time.

During my first week, I designed my self portrait. I learnt how to use photoshop to crop the image.

This is the picture of my self portrait.

Also, I finished the handbook webpage. The idea is to make a flip book and each page of the book contains the information from the handbook that I found interesting.

GIF

UT Graduation, UX for Live-Streaming

The university is going to be having a live-stream graduation ceremony for the College of Liberal Arts. About two weeks ago we had a sprint collaboration on creating user personas for three kinds of people who will be accessing the site. Grandparents, parents, and extended family are the main users and I was given persona A, the grandparents, to work on. I’ve been preoccupied with the French course that I am making studio assets and web assets for but I found time today to work on polishing up user flows and creating sketches. I used lucid charts and miro to create the graphics you see below. I screenshotted Maddy’s UX annotations and used them to lay out the site like a jigsaw puzzle and for simplicity to make user flow as easy as possible.

I’ve been working on Dana Center Carnegie Case Studies.

In case you aren’t familiar with the project, Dana Center has funding and a need for 3 separate content design/InDesign layout projects. One of them, Arkansas, has already been completed by my lovely coworker Rachel!

That leaves the Carnegie and Strategic Direction projects. I’m not going to go in depth about the latter, since it’s an infographic centered project led by Cristina and Rachel at the moment. The Carnegie project includes 4 case studies on “Math for Manufacturing: Workforce and Higher Education Partnerships” and 1 process document. We have received content for 3 case studies.

This week I spent much of the time working on the first case study, on KY FAME.

I used Rachel’s Style B template, which had been approved for this project. However, I made some alterations on the template level as I went on, refreshing myself on paragraph and character styles as well as a little bit of GREP. For a project like this, one of the biggest concerns and most important components is consistency. To some degree, I can ensure this automatically, but I’ve also been taking notes on style in order to prepare a comprehensive style guide to accompany the 3 case studies.

I also received some pretty fast feedback from Ophella (a writer at the Dana Center) and Alison (main client), which helped guide refinement of my draft.

This project was a bit out of my comfort zone, I haven’t worked with InDesign since doing a basic training on it almost 2 years ago, so it’s definitely been a work in progress; however, so far, I am happy with my progress and the results!

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2022/03/17/43938-2/

Hello blog! I promise someday I will be better at keeping up with you. Recent activities:

Dana Center Carnegie Work 

So far I’ve been on the sidelines of this project, but starting next Monday I’m going to start entering and formatting content for Carnegie case studies using templates made by Rachel. We ran into some roadblocks with not having updated InDesign on any of the Design Lab machines, so I’m either going to bring my laptop next week or work on a computer Mike set up in a studio on the 4th floor.

COLA Web Refresh

Chris and Michelle have Adrian and I working on reformatting the LACS “Where Students Intern” site. Here is the current site. Each “review” is a separate page in Cascade (currently here). The new, redesigned site will include accordions instead of separate pages. Screenshot (below). This is a fairly time-consuming task, because it’s full of a lot of information.

Personal News

On a more personal note, I’ve received an offer from GBH’s National Center for Accessible Media, a consulting group for digital accessibility efforts within a public broadcasting organization. I have a start date of May 30th at their Boston office, with the job title of Accessibility Analyst :~) I can’t overstate how excited and grateful I am for this opportunity. Thank you so much to Suloni, Valerie, and Michelle for being my references!!