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

HDO Powerpoints

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HDO301

Project: HDO 301
Client /Prof: HDO
Completion status: July-Aug 2019
Staff guidance: Suloni Robertson
STA team members: me!
Description/plans:Create graphic assets for online HDO course, including powerpoint templates, backdrops, credits, etc.
To be completed: mid-August

 

Well well well… another week has passed by as an STA. I took a small break from monkey skulls aka VLabs to create some assets for the Intro to Human Dimensions of Orgs online course. The long-term goal is to be able to reuse these templates for any online HDO course. The department wanted to emphasize the HDO and UT brand/logo in case the slides ever appear outside of their usual context.

 

As a student I know it can feel weird if your classes feel super modern/polished/branded/whatever so I was not going for avant-garde with these designs. Lowkey=good, which is why of HDO’s three brand colors (orange, blue, gray), I used gray as the main accent color in the final. I’m sharing two drafts and and the final version is below those.

 

Drafts:

 

Final:

 

It sounds like the professor will show up in a small video box in the right bottom corner of slides, so I kept it blank down there. Next I’ll make some simple backdrop and title assets for the video team to include in recordings.

 

Personal life update, I found a really nice couch dumpster diving so sold my old one for $50! Now maybe I can get a coffee table.

VLabs

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VLABS- MORE STUFF

I worked on a good number of canvassers but then found out they all needed psd editing. So back to square one with them. It is a lot of going back and forth right now when we miss style errors by accident, but at least it is more practice for me to get better. Here is a psd I got to work on the last hours of work today.

GRAV Uploads

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    GRAV SITE UPLOADS     

Today I have been working a lot on uploading things to the GRAV site and putting together canvassers/editing and fixing mistakes on them. Maddy showed me how to toggle things on the canvasser today also. Shout out to Maddy for being a good teacher! Working with canvasser can be kind of a pain because it tends to crash on me a lot and files need to be renamed if I want to re-upload them every time. I haven’t found a way around this yet. Anyways, I will probably find myself doing plenty more of these since I have a good amount of PSDs that Valerie will review soon.

 

8Bit Gif

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8Bit Animated GIF

 

All the STAs were tasked with making a fun little 8Bit Animated GIF. This was really fun to do and was a nice break from all the Virtual Lab assignments. I decided to animate a girl jumping into the Austin Greenbelt. If I’m not at work this is probably where I have been this summer so I thought it was fitting. Here she is!

 

 

Blanton Visit

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Blanton Museum

Last week us STAs took a field trip to the Blanton Museum. I always like visiting the Blanton, especially as a nice break in between classes or work on campus.

 

We visited “Austin,” the permanent building installation by Ellsworth Kelly. It is a pseudo-cathedral constructed with materials from Spain, Germany, and the US (Georgia and Austin). I enjoy Kelly and others like Frank Stella who work in the abstract color blocked style, and it’s interesting to see that translated into a structure. The black and white “paintings” are actually black and white marble, each sourced across the world, and fused together.

The lighting in the building is gorgeous but doesn’t translate well to iPhone photography. So I rocked with it and made this edit.

Next was the Jeffrey Gibson exhibition. It featured geometric paintings and beaded sculptures inspired by his experiences growing up Native American living abroad. It was interesting how his art incorporated many words and even phrases (some lyrics?), I think it added a lot to the exhibit. It was a great time!

 

 

Though honestly anything is better than the Blanton’s last exhibit where the featured piece was a “make tacos not war” neon sign… like are you kidding me? I’m sorry but that’s been done in 1,000,000 ~quirky~ South Congress-esque stores. Or like, cards from 2012. That’s my hot art take of the day. Thank you.

Basic Training Gif

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BASIC TRAINING WITH GIFS

I worked on two little GIFs this week. The strawberry was my first attempt, but I needed to recreate one that was black and transparent. I got inspiration for the dog GIF from this YouTuber who has lots of dogs that I watch all the time as of recently. It is suppose to be an Italian Greyhound but I can’t add too much detail in an 8-bit style. Nonetheless, I had really fun making these. Hopefully the other trainings are as enjoyable!