STA Work Blog

We had the STA presentation last Friday, it was a great way to get closure on TBH and look at all the work that fellow STAs had done over the year. It was also a way to look at the future and what I will be doing over the summer and next year.

RBTL has been my main focus since we finished TBH. I’m doing good progress on the site, almost about to finish with the first poem. After that it should be more copy-paste and less coding. I developed almost 2 pages this week. The first one was Rimes, which shows the rhyming scheme for a poem. It was actually pretty tough to get the correct forming on those rhyme letters (ABBA and such). It was fun to make the animation aspect of it and see the page come to life with the colors.  A picture below.

I also started development on a second page called Sonorites. This one is special because it’s the first one I’ve done with a double sidebar, this means that a second one pops up from the bottom of the first. It’s a cool-looking animation, but tough to set up. A picture of it in action below. I still need to work out some of the details like the coloring on the titles.

Also at the end of this week I took an hour to learn about Cascade. Bryan was kind enough to teach me how to do some basic things. I will probably be doing a lot of that during the summer.

Last week was super busy in terms of the STA presentation !!! Overall, it was fantastic (apart from the technological difficulties the first 40 minutes..oopsies). It was wonderful to hear different STA’s stories during their time here at LAITS, and it motivated me to continue working hard. The graphics, audio, and video departments would not be able to exist on their own – all three are essential to making LAITS and the online courses at UT possible!!!

Here are some of the stuff I worked on for the presentation:

<keynote>

<LAITS Event Flyer assets & cutouts>

Befeore  After 

Before  After 

And of course… I cannot leave out the Photo ID’s for the week:

Finally, some ppt reformatting:

For the STA Presentation, I have contributed to the poster–cutting out and inserting objects into the “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”-esque artwork–and an animation for Samantha Skinner. Samantha is headed to New York, so Suloni wanted something special for her send-off. Below is the product of that–a whimsy, Texan scene featuring a rad Gibson Memphis ES-355, white cowboy boots, and a rocking unicorn, of course.

All of the elements were cut and spliced together using photoshop and then animated using the Timeline tool. The background music is one of Samantha’s very own songs–Fold Your Arms!

 

I really enjoyed working on this animation–especially adding some Texas flair (i.e. Those Boots!).

 

I’ve also been working with my Medical Terminolgy professor, Dr. Todd Curtis, on a textbook he has written – he has asked me to draw 100 illustrations for his textbook by the end of the summer (outside office work as an STA). This was a perfect opportunity for me to build my portfolio, as well as have my name published, for I am pursuing a career path as a medical illustrator. Medical illustration pertains to drawing of the human anatomy and physiology in myriad of ways: for doctors, for lawyers, for scientific textbooks, for biomedical companies, etc. I’m not quite sure how set I am on becoming a medical illustrator, but I hope that this is a great stepping stone for my dreams I want to achieve!! These are some of the illustrations I’ve worked on so far:

 

 

New Stuff

I haven’t done a whole lot in the past few weeks – I mainly focused on the upcoming STA presentation (started my own keynote presentation), with few projects on the side.

The main illustration/ design project I was assigned was the Immigration Poster for the History department – my fellow STA Anna thought me the basics of Adobe Illustrator, and I transferred the traced image of a copyrighted photo to Adobe Photoshop, where I manipulated with the figures and also added in a barbed wire fence, as per Suloni’s request.

Original, copyrighted image:

Mid progress:

This is the final version – I made the fence more geometric and also replaced the dog with the old man, since this is a pretty serious setting:

I also worked on some of the LAITS staff members’ powerpoint presentations:

Myra’s before:

Myra’s after:

I also started on my keynote presentation for the upcoming STA presentation, which includes actually creating the keynote slides, as well as writing a script.