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

Posters, Animations, and Mockups

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Posters, Animations, and Mockups

 

In my last post I mentioned I wanted to revisit the illustration of the lightbulb I made for the German language poster. I though it looked too flat in comparison to the original image. So I started off my shift fixing it by adding more shading and highlights. I also created more of a curve to the bottom part of the bulb.


The left image is the original poster that I was tasked to recreate in a higher resolution. The middle image was my first draft where I thought the light bulb seemed too flat. Lastly, the image on the right shows what I came up with today after making minor changes. Overall, I think it looks a lot better!

 

Next, I worked on an animation assignment Tate gave me. My task was to add line work and coloring to the laundry hamper to make it look like it is is full of clothes.

 

Appstore Front Page Banner & Footer

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I am pleased to announce that the Header & Footer for the Appstore’s front page is finally … DONE!

This was pretty difficult for me because though I have experience with HTML & CSS, I’ve never worked on code to this scale. So much work and responsibility! I’m loving it though.

 

Here’s a quick view of how it looks so far.

 

As you can tell, there’s still a lot of work to be done with the main “cards” which will contain the information of the actual individual apps. There’s also some responsive issues — when I was coding the LAITS footer, it was correctly in the bottom right but when the user resizes the browser, the footer shifts. This also happens with the “Canvas apps developed..” text. I’ll have to look into making it flow later. Chris says that these are issues that we can work with later and don’t need to cause a stop in development. Additionally, I worked on changing the “Back to Canvas” logo to being clickable and adjusting the size so that the link isn’t restricted to just the size of the text. The issues aren’t completely fixed but we’re getting there. I also changed the link colors from blue to longhorn burnt orange! So fun.

 

It’s coming together!! Slowly but surely.

Germanic Studies Poster

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Germanic Studies Poster

 

I was tasked with making a hi-res version of a Germanic studies poster advertising its language courses.

 

This is what the poster looked like. I thought it would be pretty easy to recreate because it was such a simple layout; however, the light bulb proved to be a challenge for me. I will probably ask for Duo’s help in making a more realistic lightbulb but here is what I have for now.

 

Vlabs Mockup

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Vlabs Mockup and Prototyping

 

I made my first mockup for the Vlabs UI design today. The mockups and prototyping are a very rough draft and only go over the home page but they show my main ideas for how I wanted to design the UI.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I like the idea of assigning a color and maybe an icon for each lab. I got these icons from The Noun Project but we would probably have to create our own.

 

 

 

And then it was time for prototyping! It is really tedious to do but I love seeing the webpage come to life.

 

 

 

More Updates!!

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Worked on Immigration History UI! The Lesson Plan section of the page needed some redesigning.

Here was my first solution based off of Jac’s original design. I used the information currently populating the Overview of Major Laws page for this. I separated each section into its own box.

 

Later I found out that not all the Lesson Plans have the same structure or content, so it’d be hard to divide up into sections, so I created some designs that could keep everything in one box.

 

 

I’ve also been working on more Russian illustrations.

 

 

Illustration edit! Added a snow woman with a “skirt”

 

 

And the new RUS407 banner.

 

And planning!