Current Sta
I finished up the government retractable banner project this past week, so be on the lookout for graduation banners in front of Batts Hall soon! I also presented my work on the Texas Politics Project’s social media graphics suite to (all of) LAITS on Monday. I’ll be signing off for the summer here in a few weeks, so dear reader, I will miss you!
As the CS course graphics design comes together, I created a quick 3-second animation for the Data Exploration and Visualization course using three assets that Aidan mentioned were his favorites. Here’s how the animation looks:
I also created five backdrops for different CSMS and MSDS courses, some of which I made course graphics for as well:
Once the client approved of Suloni’s quote, I made a first draft for the client, following the design request to make it look like the Moody icon:
I went through Megan and Poonum’s KB tutorial and gave them some feedback on the content. The activity was really interesting, and I’m sure that new STA’s will find it really helpful when learning the basics of InDesign. Here’s the poster I made for this tutorial:
This is an ongoing project in which Poonum asked Sheryl and me to test Ruben’s new tool for editing clips. As of now, this is how the user interface looks:
I must say it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing UI and there are still some sections where the user experience is not as intuitive as other video editing programs I’ve used (AfterEffects, iMovie) but I do think it’s headed in the right direction and just needs some tweaks. Below are some screenshots from BC in which I go into more detail on the feedback for it:
Below are some graphics I’ve been brainstorming to show Aidan on this CSMS course. The professor wants to stay away from conventional bar graphs and pie charts, and instead display information in key ways. I came up with radar charts, bubble charts, stacked graphs, and others seen below:
I’m waiting for a client’s approval to start designing an icon similar to the one below, replacing “Moody” with “MSISP”:
Throughout the week, we began giving feedback to each other on our new basic trainings.
Abriella has been working on the After Effects: Logo Animation Training, and she pointed out there was some specific instructions that weren’t correct for importing files into AE that would result in having all her layers show up at the center of the composition.
After some research on this issue, I corrected the instructions to specify that STA’s need to change the import mode to retain Layer Size:
Additionally, I went through the Color Theory KB, written by Cristina, and gave her some comments on what could be improved. I went through both activities listed in this post, creating color wheels and color palettes:
I worked on three of these on Tuesday and Thursday:
I finished up course graphics for both microeconomics and rhetoric! I got a new assignment last week to make retractable print banners (big ones) for the government department. They want two — one generic, with logos, and one for graduation (“congratulations, class of 2021”). I’ve made a ton of drafts (read: 15) and am waiting on feedback from the client.
In other news, I hear we’re starting a new training curriculum for web dev STAs, which is neat. I’ll be helping with it even though I’m not a web dev person: I’m writing up lessons on certain elements in CLIO — google forms and CSS flip cards, specifically, which loyal readers will recall I used in the D&I CLIO course we worked on over winter break.
This week, I mostly worked on tweaking and improving on the graphics with feedback from Maddy and Aidan. Here are some examples:
SIMPL:
Regression:
Design Principles and Causal Inference:
I also created a reduced menu template and used it for the GOV 365W graphics:
It’s that time of the semester again. Last week, I got two course graphics assignments, one for a microeconomics course and the other for a rhetoric course (but it’s on coding, so…)
Each are pretty straightforward, but they also have their quirks. Like I detailed in last week’s blog post, I created a hybrid image with Photoshop cutouts and image edits for the microeconomics course. We ultimately didn’t use it — instead, we’re using one of the stock images I suggested previously. And for rhetoric, the professor needed not one, not two, but six (yes, six) presentation templates in Keynote, the default Mac presentation software.
I hadn’t used Keynote, but it was fairly simple (I daresay more user-friendly that PowerPoint.) I created a template using master slides, then picked a color scheme (the professor wants his presentations color-coded) using coolors.com before making the remaining five presentations. I created the remaining graphics for that course today, like the callout buttons and the Canvas banner.
In other news, my car got dented from a hailstorm (hang in there, Camry!) and I got new blue light blocker glasses, which I highly recommend even as we’re starting to come out of the pandemic.
