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

My last post as an STA… :(

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Last STA post!

It’s been amazing meeting everyone in the STA department, and this job was one of the most enjoyable and relaxing parts of my busy semester!

Thank you to Suloni for being the nicest and sweetest supervisor I could ever ask for; I know many times I had to change my schedule around but you were always very understanding. Thank you also to Tate who was the one who introduced me to the job! I’m super proud of the animations we’ve made for Russian and it was a real pleasure working with you. Your animations are so unique and yes, I’ll gladly go follow your social media haha.

As an animator my favorite part of the job was doing the animations, but I also learned a lot about design as an STA. I finished my job where I started – working on designs for the This is Democracy podcast.

The very first draft!!!
A poster
A button
A mug

I got the opportunity to make merchandise designs for Dr. Suri. I already planned to come back and visit after my internship ends in the spring, but now I have even more reason since I’ll have a mug waiting for me!

Thank you again to all the other STAs, everyone was super nice and enjoyable to work with. If you all are still here in the spring I’ll see you then!

Theatre Philosophy

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Theatre Philosophy

So, I started working on a Theatre Philosophy project with Stacy. This is my first time working with WordPress and Python, so it’s been a different experience. Here are photos of some before/after work that was simply just displaying the content onto the page. However, today I met with Stacy and it turns out that the client wants to take a little bit different of a direction so stay tuned for changes to this site!

 

 

 

COLA ID’s

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First COLA ID

Today I did my first COLA ID with Suloni’s help! I’d never used PhotoShop before so it was definitely both a learning and cool experience. I know that this ID is not the best … but the original image that we had to work with was very very poor. As Suloni put it, this ID reflects “Sanika’s best handiwork, but not the photographer’s best handiwork.” I actually really liked working with the IDs and I assigned myself a couple more so that’s fun!

 

Immigration History Website

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Immigration History Website

I am still doing WordPress websites, for most of this semester I’ve been focusing most of my time in a specific site: Immigration History. It’s a website designed to help people learn and teach about the history of immigrants and immigration policies in the United States. It has info on all events and developments over the country’s history. It then has lesson plans that group the info of several related events. Throughout these last months the site has undergone a few major transformations all created by Stacy, our designers and myself. These were the original designs:

 

Later, a design for a Lesson Plan page was added. I worked on making it using a tab design like the one that I did for RBTL, where one tab would open a section and so on. However, the page was redesigned in a way that included all the content at the same time.

This is what the new design looks like.

One of the challenges with this design were getting the spacing to look just right on the page, it shouldn’t look too crowded. I spent a long time playing around with the margin and padding of every element.

Another challenge was getting the left sidebar to work right, all elements are supposed to be centered and the names of the sections you were currently at need to be bold. This meant I needed to use selectors pre-defined by WordPress on my CSS.

This left sidebar then became the primary navigation for the page, I overwrote the default behavior of the “Lesson Plans” button so that instead it displayed the sub-menu and let you choose a plan to visit. This way we got rid of the original Lesson Plans landing page from the original designs.

The timeline was, and is, the biggest challenge. We’ve been wrestling on how to display the events and dates. Eventually we got rid of the hover effect on them because it added no real functionality. We also decided to get rid of the big year markers, which displayed every 25 years and instead replaced them with the year of the current event. If more than one event lands in the same year then we display a line that “joins them up”.

We also decided to add space in between events to reflect the passage of time. This way 2 events that are 100 years apart will have more white space in between than 2 that are just a couple of years apart. I also added an elegant down arrow marker if there’s too much space in between, just to let the user know that there’s more events below.

We then completely changed the colors of the page to make it look less boring. This is what it looks like now:

I still need to work on the timeline a bit on the timeline but the page is about done. I’m excited about the next challenge that Stacy might have for me now.

VLabs Interactives

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Virtual Labs Interactives

 

The interaction layout seems to be able to adapt to each individual interactive which is great! It’s really all up to figuring out how to execute some of the trickier interactives. But the layout will be as follows: