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

WordPress Websites

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New Year, New Assignments

aka WordPress Websites

As the new semester begins, Suloni told me about an exciting new project that I am a part of: WordPress development with Stacy! Over the first two weeks of school I have slowly been trained to use WordPress with a series of small assignments and 1-1 sessions with Stacy. The learning curve is not too high thanks to my past web experience. Slowly I’m starting to realize that even though WordPress makes a lot of things easier with its code and add-ons, everything is vastly more complicated and powerful too.

My first project was Notevenpast.org, a very flashy history website with blog posts and book reviews and links to other UT history sites. Stacy worked with them to improve the front-end to display their book reviews. He wanted me to do something similar to the blog posts tab. In short: display all the blog posts in a visually attractive way and create a way to easily sort through them. This project wasn’t too hard because the javascript that Stacy made was mostly reusable. However, it did give me a great perspective about where everything is located in WordPress (files, folders and the website) and also how all the elements interact. Below are the before and after pictures for the site.

Poster design

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Center for Women’s & Gender Studies Event Poster Design

 

On Wednesday, I was tasked with coming up with a layout for a poster promoting an event for the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. I was given two images, the guest’s book cover and photograph, and some text detailing the event. Suloni wanted me to create two drafts: one image based and one text based.

 

 

 

 

 

 

These were the three drafts I came up with. I like how the text based drafts turned out but I don’t think I am allowed to alter the image of the book cover as I did… I’m going to go ahead and send the first draft without the altered image to the client.

Blog update

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COLA IDs and V Labs

Here is a much needed update for my blog. Last week I worked mainly on the Anthropology Virtual Labs. But first I had some COLA Ids to edit. Yay! Here is 5 of the 10 IDs I was assigned:

Even more V labs!

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Still working on v-labs stuff!!! Woooo!

Look at all this lovely stuff.

I accidentally put %block-start% in a place it wasn’t supposed to be in and it made it look really cool.

 

I really like how it looks more “together”.

 

I honestly, really like how this looks because it’s easier to visualize and see how the blocks associate and relate to each other based on each subsection. I wonder if I can take this up to someone…?

Vlabs!

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I worked a lot more on V-labs today. My shift was short, but I wrapped up a section for the lab I was assigned. I’m quite pleased with myself 🙂

Homepage

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Spanish Hybrid Homepage Design

project: Homepage Banner Design for
Client /Prof: Sarah Jey Whitehead
completion status: Started September 28, 2018
staff guidance: Bridget Apfeld
STA team members: Duo
description/plans: Find 20 free image for the banner and let the professor pick her top 10 favorites. The 10 selected images will be used for the banner design
To be completed: TBD

 

BUTTONS IN ALL CAPS

Canvas Graphics