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 I started coding the Theatre Philosophy Site, the idea is to create a single web application that can change screens according where the user want to navigate, without reloading an external page. I was able to display the navigation bar, and map it with the possible data.
I haven’t updated my blog in awhile, so here we go…
project: RUS Promotional Material
Client /Prof: Mike/ Dr. Rice
completion status: In progress (waiting to hear back)
staff guidance: Suloni, Tate
STA team members: N/A
description/plans: create a 5×7 postcard for RUS promo
To be completed: Feb. 12, 2019
Following up on the 8.5×11 and 11×17 RUS promotional poster/flyer, Tate has asked me to work on a 5×7 postcard. Since he has already created the front side of the postcard, my job was to create the backside that matches both my flyer design and the front design. After messing with different designs, I decided to stick to the front design more so than the flyer design. These are the final versions I came up with, and Tate and I are waiting to hear back from Mike and Dr. Rice !
project: “Brexit in Global and Historical Context” Flyer
Client /Prof: Courtney
completion status: completed [Feb. 28, 2019]
staff guidance: Suloni
STA team members: Olivia
description/plans: create a 11 x 17 flyer for the History Department event
To be completed: Mar. 12, 2019
Another big project I have been working on as been the flyer for a History Event called “Brexit in Global and Historical Context” Courtney. Suloni has asked me to be the ART DIRECTOR for this project, meaning that I would assign the graphics to someone else (which turned out to be Olivia), communicate with the client, and also work on the layout design. At first, I was scared to jump into a more of a leadership role, because I am still doubtful about my skills and experiences in design. But ultimately, I was super glad I stepped out of the comfort zone, because Courtney and the event organizer loved my design! A huge shoutout to Olivia who has helped me with the colorization of the image for the poster, as well.
Before taking a jab at the layout design, I first focused on communicating with Olivia and giving her the assignment. It felt funny that I was teaching someone else how to do things like “color overlay” and giving instructions, because I was in Olivia’s shoes when I first became an STA. How the turntables!! I came up with a thorough instruction so that Olivia would feel comfortable working on the graphics, as well as understand Courtney’s requests clearly.
Because the B&W version of “Paul Revere’s Ride” looked like an antique illustration, I initially wanted to incorporate an old newspaper feel. This is the first version I came up with:
Although Courtney liked this version, I was not too happy with it because nothing really “stood out.” I wanted the text and colors to pop, and so I came up with a different design…
There were some adjustments to make in terms of the text and the placement of things, but Courtney and James ultimately chose this one as the final version! With Olivia’s graphic, I had to add the text bubble, “European Union” sign on the house, and the red “Paul Revere’s Ride” text at the bottom; I wanted the font and the word bubble to match the overall style of the original image. Overall, I am super happy with how this flyer turned out, and most importantly, very content with my ability to do client communication! Everything went smoothly (maybe beginner’s luck?), and I am excited to take on more projects for the near future.
project: Mellon Scholars Seminar
Client /Prof: Mellon Scholars
completion status: completed [Feb. 26, 2019]
staff guidance: Suloni, Tate
STA team members: Jac
description/plans: lead a Photoshop seminar for the Mellon Scholars
To be completed: Feb. 26, 2019
Another project that Jac, Tate, and I have been working on for the past 2 weeks have been the seminar for the Mellon Scholars. For Part 1 of the seminar, Jac started off with a presentation about design and the visual “guidelines” that come with creating any promotional materials, like a flyer. Then Tate gave a brief overview about Photoshop and useful tools, as well as some important terminologies. I then led the group to make a flyer identical to my 11×17 flyer I made for RUS promo. Although at times it was difficult, because the group varied in their experience with Photoshop, I think it went great, overall. For Part 2 of the seminar, we were able to do a one-on-one with the scholars regarding specific things they wanted to work on utilizing Photoshop. I helped Ricardo with photo editing, as well as helping Michael with his flyer design at times. I hope that the Mellon scholars thought the 4 hour cram session of Photoshop was worth awhile!
This is a google doc that Jac made for the overview of what we should do for Part 1: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zVTbTAjzfuu7HF5FjEP-G83k1K7FvSRpiMO_qTIQjcA/edit#heading=h.5x0d5h95i329
FINALLY, not really a project, but now that both Olivia and Clarissa sent in their avatars, I was able to update the STA blog banner:
Today, I kept working on the Prototype for the Theater of Philosophy Site, the content mockup was created, and also some versions for the authors and philosopher’s pages were developed.
Suloni asked me to help with rebuilding the LAITS Web Services website! The current website is pretty arbitrary. The links & content don’t make sense. Not to mention, the user has no idea what the website is actually for. So far, my tasks have been to create mock-ups for the new banner & suggest edits to the actual website. Today, I incorporated my edited banner/mock-up into the “test” Cascade site.
Obviously there’s still a long road ahead but this is pretty cool!
In preparation for the meeting with Dr. Hsu on Wednesday, I made the Glossary page look really nice. It looks just like Jac’s design now.
The meeting went pretty good, Dr. Hsu seems to really like the work we’ve done for her. She was pleasantly surprised when I explained how the Glossary works, by auto-generating the in-line buttons. She originally had the impression that she was going to have to manually create every entry, which would’ve been a lot of work. I also taught her how to enter new words into the Glossary and how to use the synonym functionality that we built in; this way the Glossary will capture alternate versions of a term, like “alien” and “aliens”.
One great piece of feedback that she had was that the page looked a little too crowded. We found a paragraph that actually had the word ‘citizenship’ 4 different times in-line. I decided to keep it at a maximum of 1 in-line link per term per text node, which meant all I had to do was modify my regex a little. Hopefully It’ll be enough to make it look way better.
The main thing left to do is the front page, which still looks pretty much like it did last year. Dr. Hsu gave us a few requests on what pictures and text to use for the ‘Teach’ section. For the ‘Learn’ section she had an idea that I thought was pretty interesting, to have a ‘Trending topics’ section where students can easily access the most relevant lesson plans. In order to make this happen, and make it easy for our clients to change the trending lessons over time, I decided to add a boolean attribute to the Lesson plans on WordPress. This way, all Dr. Hsu will have to do is click it on or off in order to change the Lessons that are featured in the front page. It was interesting getting more hands-on with our “database” and learning a bit more about Advanced Custom Fields. Now all I have to do is create a cool display for the trending lessons.
Today, I continued working on the design of the prototype for the Theatre of Philosophy Site, I was able to think about the navigability of the site and also come across with a new tab as index for multiple taxonomies.
