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
Today will be my last shift working as an STA. The last task I worked on was finding photos for the following Psychology powerpoint.
I’ve learned a lot about effective client communication and setting project expectations through my time working at LAITS, as well as graphic design principles and practices. Thank you to Suloni, Andre, Ruben, Stacy, and the other STAs for making this a great campus job!
This week I was assigned to create a logo for the American Ingredient podcast. It needed to be black & white and the client had in mind “a white bowl in the shape of the U.S. … Above the bowl would be two spoons with filled something that looked like brown sugar.” After brainstorming a bit, I thought the best way to get the U.S. shape was to create a broken bowl. Here are the initial drafts:
And finals:
If the project was’t constrained to the black & white color scheme, I think a vintage cookbook cover design could be really cool/clever.
Before the winter semester came to an end, I finished a few projects, of which included the U12_6 illustration for RUS407 and an LAH flyer for Stacey. U12_6 was super fun to work with, since I had to come up with an entirely new character illustration on Photoshop, along with his tools and a broken oven he was trying to fix. As usual, I first sketched the scene out and worked my way through.
U12_6 sketch:
The handyman character I made:
And the final illustration!
LAH flyer:
