STA Blog

STA Work Blog

STAs: Student Technology Assistants

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.

Prospective STAs:

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 and Staff:

Faculty & Staff with questions about services, please contact us.

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/laits/contacts.php

  • Audio Services: Michael C Heidenreich, Audio Services Manager
  • Video Services: Kelly Webster, Video Production Supervisor
  • Graphic Design & Web Design Services: Suloni Robertson, Art Director / STA Program Manager

Department of History: DACA Poster

By

Department of History: DACA Panel Poster

 

The Design

I used Bebas Neue and Tahoma Bold+Regular. For my color palette, I juxtaposed a bright, saturated red against a less saturated bluish-purple. Since the image looked kind of choppy, I used the gaussian blur filter to make it look smoother and then applied a gradient map. Poster v1a (top-left) has a purple-to-red map whereas v1b (top-right) has a red-to-red map.

Potential Issues

Disregard poster v3. I decided to include it in this post, but I don’t think it’s a viable design: it has too many scattered elements and almost no information hierarchy. It’s also incomplete (the panel info and the date aren’t placed intentionally).

 

– The bottom two posters have a white background, which is not visible on this WordPress site.

– Posters v1a and v1b (the top two) may need to be color corrected–they turned out a lot darker when exported than when I opened them up in Photoshop. Will look into this later.

– I didn’t include bleeds…should I?

 

I may or may not make another version without Tahoma, perhaps replacing it with Futura, or using Didot for a sans-serif version.

 

RUS illustration

By

It’s been awhile since I’ve updated my blog… I worked on several different things the past month, but RUS 406/ 407 have been my main focus.

My finished product of U5_4 with all the characters placed & dressed in winter clothing:

I finished the side view of Aunt Lena, following Anna’s style with the front view of the character:

Helped to edit the Government website banner to correspond to the removal of 3 statues in the West Mall:

Worked on another banner for the History & Philosophy of Science department:

T H E N, I have been working most on U8_1 illustration for RUS 407, which have been extremely challenging but fun at the same time – this is the first illustration I’ve done ! Previously, I only colored illustrations that have already been done mostly by Valerie and Kathy, so it was really exciting to draw my own scene and color it in. Although it took me quite some time to finish, I’m glad I had the opportunity to learn and establish my illustration skills in Adobe Photoshop. Here’s the progress for the scene:

At first, I tried to illustrate straight on the art pad onto Photoshop…

But it didn’t look too great! So Suloni suggested that I sketch it out onto a piece of paper first:

Looking much better, I then scanned my sketch then started tracing it on the art pad in Photoshop:

Finished product!

Apart from these, I did a ton of photo ID’s, too.

U9_7 Drawing

By

I started my first illustration for RUS 407 today! My first assignment should depict Polina and Oleg inspecting a linden tree. I used reference images of the tree and of linden orchards for the background. From there, I made a rough sketch of the orientation of the page to show what is in the background and where Polina and Oleg are.

I cleaned up the line-work, and changed the shape of the leaves to be more accurate to the linden tree.

I also fixed the flowers to be more acurate as well.

I added in Oleg and Polina to the scene.

I was given the task to color the scene, which I was stoked for! I added greys and sepias to each layer in order to label the foreground and background

Here is the final colored drawing: