Who We Are
LAITS: IT and Facilities Director, Joe TenBarge initiated the Student Technology Assistant program in 2004. STAs are UT students who work on a variety of projects in collaboration with UT faculty and LAITS staff members. STAs assist College of Liberal Arts faculty members and administrative staff with print and web design. From building presentations, to creating audio/visual works, and producing online classes in the LAITS film studios, STAs are instrumental in helping COLA faculty realize their vision for multimedia projects that enhance their teaching and the students learning experience. By the end of their student careers, STAs have portfolios which demonstrate their accrued technical and design skills.
Creative and technically inclined students are appointed as STAs for one year, with the possibility of being rehired as long as they study at the university. Applicants for the program are hired before both long semesters. Interested students may look for postings on Hire-A-Longhorn when positions are available. Positions will have Student Technology Assistant (illustrator or web designer) in the title of the job post.
Faculty & Staff with questions about services, please contact us.
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/laits/contacts.php
I chose this text-based design because I think the target audience (i.e. “young people in their teens & 20’s” / aka ME) will respond well to something clean and bright.
Note: When the cover art is sized down, it will be difficult to read the tagline. I believe that a more appealing design would leave out the tag.
This past week I’ve finished working on Cascade I’ve started working on my two training assignments for the online Russian course. For Kathy I’m working on a practice illustration which was supposed to include one character, one animal, and a background. I started drawing a person walking their dog on a country road, first sketching everything in and doing my line work and colors each on a separate layer. This is my progress:
Today I did some COLA IDs, assigned by Chloe. I adjusted the exposure, brightness, and saturation of the images to make there faces more visible and the color more vibrant. The first photo was sent in as a 100 x 124 px image, too small for the 200 x 300 px profile image, so I was advised by Suloni to use the original size for the profile picture and not stretch the image.
I was also assigned by Tate to create a hairstyle for a character that’s going to be used in the Russian animations. I’m drawing the side and front view of a ponytail for “Waitress 2”
Next week Chloe and I will meet with a client to explain the process of using Cascade.
This week I worked on the podcast cover for This is Democracy, and it has been a very fun experience! I chose a very simple art style for the four characters and gave them distinctive features to show diversity. Because the professor wants to cater to the younger, student audience, I wanted to create something that would catch the attention of people in my age group, and not to seem very boring, thus I decided to approach my design with a comic art style. To do that, I incorporated bright colors and screentones to give out a youthful and energetic feel that would attract student.
I received some wonderful feedbacks from other STAs that feel like the red text is a bit hard to read in the draft version, so in my final version, I added white text bubbles to increase the contrast between the background and text. To further emphasize the comic style boldness, I changed the stroke on all text and images to a dark gray shade as opposed to the previous dark blue, and used a different sized screentone to add shadows. To make the composition more exciting, I also added some emphasizing strokes with a textured brush to show direction and drew some stars as well.
Overall, I had so much fun working working on this podcast cover, and I’m very happy that I had this opportunity to explore different styles. Though I followed all the design guidelines from the professor, I know that my design is very different from all the other designs, but I hope my design would add a bit of fun to someone’s day~
Other than a whole lot of photo ID trainings and handing out photo ID assignments out to the new STA’s, I have also worked on some design projects.
First is making my own character design for the RUS 412 animations. It’s been almost a year since I’ve used Adobe Animate!!! So I have been super slow with using the tools and getting my way through the program yesterday. However, Tate organized everything so well and gave clear instructions that I managed to finish my first character – the waiter!!! I still have to make some adjustments, like getting rid of the ponytail and centering the hat. I can’t wait to keep working with Adobe Animate!
I also made some adjustments to the podcast cover art. Still have to add/ make changes, like add the wigs, put some colored splatters in the background (Suloni’s request), and play around with the words. So far, I like the way it looks..I think!
I finished the character creation assignment in Adobe Animate. The tutorials were really helpful since I had no prior experience in Animate. The character I created was the pedestrian character. (Reference and my result shown below)
I also edited my This Is Democracy podcast cover taking into consideration the feedback Suloni gave me. I tried to add more detail into the wigs and made the characters’ eyebrows different colors to show that the wigs were fake. I also changed the size of the speech bubbles and enlarged the title and subtitle so it would be more legible in the mockup.
Last week and this week I’m super busy, I have like 5 projects going on at a time!
For the Racial Geography Tour, I went over my drafts with Jac and Suloni but it was decided later that they wouldn’t need them anymore :’) So all I’ve done for it so far this week is edit some hand symbols:
Later this week I will be working on a campus map for the site.
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I also went over my “This is Democracy” design with Suloni to revise it and potentially prep it for my portfolio. I’m still messing around with it, but I’m trying to make the font more legible for the quote and make the wigs look more like wigs.
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I worked on screen displays for the Texas Archaeology online course. I’ll probably think of something new to put on the vertical display so I didn’t include it here.
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Finally, I worked on the character creation portion of the animations for RUS412. My assignment was to make an “Awake Girl” character, this peppy college student who loves mornings (definitely not same). I referenced Penny Proud and Snow White, as shown in the pic below. Since I already had some prior experience with Animate, the hardest part for me was just figuring out the way Tate organizes things. I hope everyone else has an easy time figuring out symbols! They can get complicated for sure.
