STA Work Blog

So after Suloni and Ruben presented our final draft of TBH to the people in charge they found some issues with the interactives. Suloni created a special committee with STA’s Chloe and Esther to help us look over all of our interactives and find any differences between them and their Flash counterparts. For this we used a new version of the spreadsheet that helped us visualize the status of each one. I basically have spent about 2 weeks fixing all these problems.

We discovered a lot of problems with the links in the site especially. This is because the original page was not made to work along with our new Canvassers. In order to completely fix this Ruben created an algorithm that detected every time an interactive opened an external page. Tate and I had to look over all these instances and fix the ones that linked back to the interactive.

(the picture says almost 700 but it actually ended up being like 60)

Hi there! I’m Estella and here’s a bit about me: I am a sophomore Management of Information Systems major at the McCombs School of Business. I’ve loved to draw and design ever since I can remember. When I’m not working, you can find me listening to literally any genre of music, watching Netflix, or reading. I’m not too big on sports, but I can appreciate athleticism, and while I might come off as shy, I would actually really love to get to know you!

Today was my first day at work as an STA, and I am super excited to start officially working on projects with everyone! When I got in, Suloni taught me how to clock-in and gave me a quick run down of the STA Daily Plan. I spent a few minutes making my sharpie avatar (which was fun) and then went over the STA Handbook which consisted of all the rules about being a STA. I made my blog banner in photoshop, and now I’m typing out my first official blog post! I have to say, having been a PC user all my life, getting used to the layout of the Mac has taken me a bit of time (why’s it command instead of ctrl anyway??) but overall, I’ve enjoyed my first few hours. Ready to contribute and learn a lot!

Yesterday I made a mockup for the cover art of a podcast called This is Democracy. The client requested that the image show young people wearing 19th century wigs, with the U.S. constitution as a backdrop, in a 1400 x 1400 px document. Here is my mockup:

 

 

Beyond that, I’ve just been working on COLA IDs:

And my Cascade test site (see previous blog post).

 

RUS 412K Animation Update

The week marking the beginning of training/pre-production for RUS412K animations has finally arrived. I spent last week talking with Dr. Rice about the first section of new animations, receiving clarification, finalizing the art style and setting up the google sheet used for assigning tasks. Dr. Rice has been continually providing me with image references to make the animations more accurate to Russian culture; including both images and videos of Russian spaces. I got feedback for the first animation that I made for the new semester, and have already incorporated one of Dr. Rice’s notes, specifically that Russian apartments typically don’t have adjacent rooms without a wall separating them. I’ll post a video with this change soon! Now, the apartment just needs to be cluttered up a bit more to be more fitting with what is more typically seen in Russia. I have also attached a screenshot of how I have the google sheet organized right now.

Project: Racial Geography Tour (ongoing)

Staff Guidance: Suloni, Jac

Description: For most of last week, I just worked on more drafts for the Racial Geography Tour. I’ll be discussing them soon with Suloni and Jac to see what worked and didn’t work.

The first variation was just to try to overlay the two images because the way the photos were taken were so similar. I tried to include the man standing with his hands on his hips and as much of the old architecture in the background as possible. This time I did a solid red sky as well, and I also tried to lighten the tree background in the “present-day” image to make the statue and the people stand out more.

I then did some variations playing with the museum display design where I gave the image a description card, and another one with the dates spray painted on. I like the spray paint one since the color of the text matches that of the “Black Lives Matter” spray.

___________________

I also worked on my Cascade site a little when I had the time.

I’ve added the identities (COLA and STA icons), the main banner image/headers, and several events involving birds and picnics. It’s a very relaxing site.

__________________

Finally, I also did some drafts for the “This Is Democracy” podcast for Dr. Suri. I wanted to maintain a minimalistic and simple design that could be recognized even if the icon for the podcast was very small. Here’s one of the drafts: If I’m making a second draft, I will definitely refine the figures and make their shapes neater.

Overall, I’ve been pretty busy this week!

The past few weeks, I’ve worked on several different projects. The latest one I’ve worked on was the podcast cover art for “This is Democracy” – it was really fun to design the illustration and create my first rough drafts. I think this is the first time I’ve fully scratched something from scratch and allowed to showcase my creativity at work as an STA. I hope Suloni would assign me more of these kinds of projects !!! The main instructions we had to follow were:

• The “This is Democracy” podcast will be designed to appeal to young people(teens/20’s). Dr. Suri and his guest speakers, will explore current events and how they tie back to historical events.
• Dr. Suri would like to see your visualizations for his idea.
• He envisions something that looks like the constitution as a backdrop, for ethnically diverse young people in their teens & 20’s. The people look modern, but they are wearing 1800’s wigs.
• The emotional tone of the art work should match the tone of the podcast: upbeat, youthful, hopeful
• Your designs must have the title and subtitle worked into them

The thing that I couldn’t quite work with was the 1800’s wigs, but I am hoping it would look better once I illustrate the actual wig instead of copy and pasting a badly cropped wig on the characters.

Without the wigs:

With the wigs:

I also worked on a LAH logo for Stacey:

I continued helping the new STA’s with photo ID training & ended up working on a “guide” for all the STA’s to follow, as per request by Suloni! It was adjusted a little bit because of my wording, but this is my first draft:

Suloni’s edited version:

Duo, Suloni, and I also worked on Prof. Barchas’ scanning request for her antique print. I scanned the print, and Duo helped with stitching the scans together ~seamlessly~. The outcome was amazing, and everyone was happy – especially Prof. Barchas!!

I also worked on different projects, like the CHI507 ppt/ video syncing!!