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, Director of Studio Operations & STA Program Coordinator
  • Video Services: Kelly Webster, Video Production Supervisor, Video STA Supervisor
  • Graphic Design & Web Design Services: Suloni Robertson, Art Director / Design & Coding STA Supervisor

Routing taxonomies and entities

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Today, I could make the routing between entities work, so you can navigate through the detail pages between the different main sites (index, philosopher, contributor, bibliography). I also updated the prototype as the site to show the full bibliography, instead of the title.

 

3-25-19

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Vlabs Interactives

Last week I got trained to make assets for the vlabs interactives, which is going to be a pretty big project lasting into the summer. We’re creating everything in Photoshop, and every popup and clickable item (word, arrow, shape, etc) needs to be saved on its own layer so that when it gets put into Canvasser each element can be isolated.

This is the background for a lab 2 section 1 interactive (each lab has its own color, and lab 2 is red):

 

 

And this is the beginning screen, which is greyed out until you click the “Begin Interactive” button (which will be added later in Canvasser):

 

 

Other than that, I’ve been doing photo IDs and updating a few of the Cascade/Web Editor how-to pages.

Efficiency in the site

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Today I internally made some improvements in the way I was sorting and retrieving information in the site, also I added the Topic Tab information displaying which taxonomy it belongs to as well alphabetic order for all taxonomies. After, I started to work on the displaying of information for each of the taxonomies, now you can see related philosophers.

“Final” Redesign

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Andd the “Final” version of the LAITS Web Services Rebuild is Here!

Suloni & I spent quite a bit of time reworking the design of the orange callout box. I learned so much about Cascade’s callout box styling (and how much it LOVES to wrap..) I think I’ve really gotten the hang of Cascade and coding in the source code box of Cascade. I’m actually so proud of how the design turned out! The linked buttons at the bottom of the page were especially fun. That being said, if Tim approves of this layout then this project is officially done!

 

Final Poster

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Final Draft for History Department Poster

 

Here is the finalized design for the poster I was drafting a couple weeks ago. Since then, I added a tear effect to blend the two images together and formatted the text to look more symmetrical. I’m really glad with how it turned out!