To end off the month of May, this will be a quick update on the projects I’ve been working on!

GOV310L

I’ve been making more stingers! Here’s how they’re coming along.

I wish I was able to find a work around for the text on the “On the Ground” stinger but there maybe change to it in the future, if I have time I’ll see if I can make an alternate edit to it.

Roster Poster ideas

For the Fall 2025 STAs, I was assigned to help brainstorm some ideas for potential roster poster themes. Here’s what I thought of.

Roster Themes:

• Music
  • Making posters from famous albums covers and STAs are displayed on CD covers or vinyls
• Library
  • Posters from famous book covers, STA’s displayed on book covers
• Space
  • Planets and solar system, STAs displayed on stars or meteors
• Ocean
  • Coral reefs, ocean animals, STAs displayed on bubbles or shells
• Video Games
  • STA’s on classic game cartridges and poster can be made after game covers
• Painting
  • Roster poster is a painting palette, there’s different paints and art supplies around
  • Graffiti style alternatively? 

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.