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 am currently working on a follow-up for the winter summer courses online postcard. Using the style of the same paper collage style, the scene now will just be summer themed. Below is the first draft of the beach design.
Additionally, I am going to develop a garden scene with the laptop in a hammock as well. I believe lots of greens would be visually appealing, and the added hammock would be playful.
First round edits:
Round 2 edits:
And here is the finalized design:
This week I’ve been focused on TBH like the last ones.
I was working on Doorways to the Past for the first half of the week. I set up all the second windows that pop up when you click the ‘Check out the Evidence’ button. I’ve been having issues because there’s just too many objects and nested things that I need to include. For example, in the third door, after you check out the evidence each picture has a hover effect that makes it bigger. This is hard to set up since it means there’s now about 4 layers of objects working at the same time. Also, since we don’t have hover I’ve been forced to explore Canvasser to find new solutions. My idea was that, instead of using 2 different picture objects, I would use a condition to make the same picture grow when you click it and shrink when you click it again. I was trying to set that up but I couldn’t get it to work. I gave up and decided to ask Nick later. When changing some other things in the interactive I ran into an error where my output wouldn’t show. That basically meant I could’t work on this for the rest of the week.
The second half of the week was more productive. I started working on those old interactives I mentioned before: Prairies and Marshlands and Prehistoric Texas. Suloni gave me new design ideas for those so I was able to quickly implement those. For the first one I just ignored the hover effects. For the second one I used a two button system in which by clicking the map you get a button that comes up. By clicking that you open a link. I finished those two, effectively getting 2 interactives off our to-do list!
This was the first batch of photo id’s that I processed for the COLA Database. Aidan gave me a tutorial on some adjustments and cropping, and I’m waiting to hear feedback on whether I need to edit more or if I can push these images to live.
It’s been a while since I’ve done photo ID’s, so it was nice to take a break from illustrations and work on a few of them today.
As usual, I have worked on the RUS 407 illustrations, as well as some flyers for the LAITS events.
U14_3 coloring (Tate did the illustration)
Then colored in the people:
And then a huge chunk of the past 2 weeks was devoted to creating a LAITS events flyer with Mike and Suloni – it was challenging to fit all the different kinds of characters all the STA’s have created (Russian, Latin, Animations). But nevertheless, it is nice to see the final product that Suloni have graciouslly touched upon on my draft.
My draft (after many tries…):
Suloni’s final draft:
Added STA-illustrated characters from RUS 406/7 and LAT 506/7 courses to PPT template for LAITS event:
Developing and Teaching Online Foreign Language Courses
Presented by Heather Rice and Steve Lundy
Feb. 23rd, 2018 | 2:30pm, CLA 1.302E
