STA Work Blog

UT Instapoll Icon Design

I was tasked with making an icon for the attendance function in UT Instapoll. As the icons are only 26px x 26px there wasn’t much room to make anything to intricate. It was challenging to try to make an icon that was understandable at such a small size but thats what is so impressive about iconography.

These were the two icons I created. The first is a simple icon of a person with a checkmark and the second is a raised hand. We went with the first one to be used which I ended up making a crisper version of. Below is what it will look like in use.

Last week, in place of our meeting,  my coworkers and I went to the Blanton Art Museum and saw Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin. I’ve been to Austin once before, but it was very crowded and it was difficult to move around. Going with my coworkers last week was a much better experience.

It wasn’t crowded when we went to see Austin and it was nice being able to walk around and admire the building without having to maneuver around folks. Here are some pics I took while we were there!

We also went to the Blanton to take a peek at the current exhibit!

We’ve also made a lot of progress for V-labs! The process goes from PSD/PNG creation to PSD/PNG review to Canvasser for assembly and then it’s placed on the site. Assembling the interactive in Canvasser is the last step of the process so looking at the Canvasser To-Do list gives me a good gauge of our progress.

We have a lot of PSD/PNG files to review, but we’re already deep in Lab 12 which is very exciting! I think we got a lot more done than was originally projected. Hopefully I can get the PSD/PNG files reviewed soon.

In other non-work related news, I have a kitten now! My family and I were aware that there was a litter of kittens residing in our backyard. We knew that there were 3-4 black kittens and one gray one. The gray kitten was much friendly than the others and would follow my mother around and let people pet her. This past weekend, my mother was looking for her little garden companion and couldn’t find her. My mother walked around over to behind our shed because the kittens frequented that area, and she found the little gray kitten by herself. The mother cat and the other kittens were on the patio and my mom was confused about why she was left behind. My mom picked her up and saw that there were pieces of leaves and debris stuck to the discharge coming from her eyes and nose. She brought the little kitten in and she and my sister took the kitten to the only pet hospital that was open on Saturday.

The doctor was briefed on the situation and he said the mother probably kicked the kitten out of the litter. It was fine to take care of her though because she no longer needed her mother’s milk. He checked up on the kitten and said that she had an upper respiratory infection which explained her crusty eyes and runny nose and gave us antibiotics. And then they adopted her.

So anyway here she is! She recently learned how to use the litter box, she’s eating a lot more food now, but she still has to take her water via a syringe. She’s a lot more playful now too 🙂 OH! Her name is Luna :^)

IMG_6745

Vlabs

I’ve mainly been working on vlabs the past week; here are some screenshots of some of the psd/png assignments I’ve done:

<lab 10 | sec 4>

<lab 12 | sec 4>

& there are a lot more, but you get the idea!

!!!!LIFE UPDATE!!!!

My roommate adopted a new puppy, and we are 98% going to name him Barton (after Barton Springs) – Bartie for short. He’s about 3 months old, and he was being cared at a foster home after he got hit by a car 🙁 He limps still, but he can now go up and down the stairs by himself!!! I love him, but he’s been peeing on my room carpet… so I’m a bit sad. But I’m sure he’ll learn to potty in no time!!

P R O D U C T I V I T Y

Hello again! I have had productive days at work going through and creating a bunch of PSD files for the Grav site. I still need to put all of these into canvasser to make them interactive once Valerie is done double checking and exporting the layers. I had accidentally been merging the layers too much which created some difficulties in editing parts of the psd. However, after I realized this I opted for grouping thing instead of merging and that helps things run more smoothly. Rookie mistake but I’m getting better! Hope you enjoy seeing what I have been doing and like this new blog post format I tried out. (^: Gif is made by Fanny Luor and not my own.

GIF

Lab 12 Section 2 Absolute Brain Size

Lab12 Section 3 Modeling mDTA Evolution

Lab 12 Section 4 Exercise: Discovering a Fossil Human

Lab 12 Section 4 Dating the Excavation Layers

Hello! This is the instructional page that I mentioned earlier. It is my first one that I have done here and Bridget helped me a lot with design tips for the page and giving me feedback on edits that I needed to make. I think this also prompted the idea for an instructional page on making instructional pages so that the formatting is always unified under specific rules.

I do have an idea of also possibly adding a youtube site where we can record ourselves going through the steps on the computer screen later adding a voice over for verbal instructions. Just in case some people still struggle with following the written instructions alone. We will see if this is an idea worth implementing when I find the opportunity to mention it.

I decided to upload something a little different instead of an interactive. Today I was given a bunch of the smaller quick-fix pages for the GRAV site. By this I mean the ones that don’t require an interactive but need an edited image for a popup page. So far I have done about two today and one interactive. I think I will try to fit another interactive in my last hour of this shift. I was also changing out a banner in cascade for a program and editing an instruction page that I created on editing unit blocks.