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.
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 & Staff with questions about services, please contact us.
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/laits/contacts.php
Today I finished my flashcards for basic training 🙂
I also got assigned to do a test sketch for the RUS412K animation to show where my skills are at. Here’s a picture of my progress so far!
Rough sketch of what I have in mind!
I’ll start on the line art next shift as soon as I finish the rough sketch.
All of my immediate assignments are finished, so I’m basically exclusively working on the patch and banner right now. I sketched some more designs in my notebook with pencil this time based on some ideas I got off of Pinterest and Google.
Admittedly, I’ve been behind on updating this blog since Summer ended. Ops… BUT, these past couple of weeks, I got a lot done!
Firstly, I continued to work on watercolor backgrounds for Tate and the Russian project.
I created an escalator lamp, that will be on the subway escalator as a character rides it.
I also worked on coloring the Moscow Street background. We wanted to match the colors with some of the other backgrounds, so we made the shading more maroon and added more details and shadows to the street and windows and doors.
Additionally, I made a traffic overhead image and side view image. I really like how the bright green turned out against the gray highway:
There was a need to make some posters for the subway walls as the characters walk/ride the escalator past them. Tate suggested using the already existing characters in making some humorous posters featuring them, so here’s what I came up with:
The first poster is an action/mystery movie poster featuring the Adventurer character. It says “Danger Coming Soon”
The second poster is an ad for the Cafe with the Cafe Owner giving a thumbs up and charming smile.
The third poster is a shampoo/beauty ad that features the waiter character standing in a field.
Besides Russian, I’ve also been working more on the UT Psych CE Logo, even though we put a pause on it for now. Here’s the last logo design I came up with:
I wanted to make a version of the logo that was more clearly leaf-inspired but still maintained the cut up geometric aesthetic.
Other assignments I worked include helping Valerie and Emily with their COLA IDs and designing the STA 4 patch and STA Blog banner.
It was kind of hard for me to come up with an idea for the patch. After quite a bit of scrolling through Google, I found a patch I liked. It was colorful, a little retro, and simple, so I modeled my design after it. I’m not entirely satisfied with these designs just yet, so I’m still looking for more design ideas right now!
I thought it’d be kind of cute if we had all of the STAs as stickers in a sketchbook or something artsy like that. In order to make it look more busy and playful, I added some doodles here and there. This is still just a work in progress though!
Over the past week I began my COLA ID Photo Training. Estella ran through the steps with me and I began working on my assigned COLA IDs right away.
These were the four IDs that I completed and uploaded:
I also began working on the Texas Beyond History project. I met with Stacy Vlasits and he introduced me to the project and taught me the basic coding functions I needed to understand how to clean up the code and attach the master template to the TBH pages. I used Adobe Dreamweaver for the first time and it was pretty similar to the software I have used prior (SublimeText). I started working on the templates and have run into a few problems and errors that I do not know how to fix. I will meet up with Stacy again next week to review the pages I have already finished and go over the pages I am having trouble with. In the screenshot below you can see I have gotten through about half of the templates (the purple highlighted ones are the ones I have run into problems).
That’s it!
I’m just continuing my basic training for this shift. I made some flash cards for one of the assignments 🙂
Just some buns and crystals 🙂
Also worked on some STA patch designs that I’ll put up next shift when I’ve scanned my drawing. I also finally found the time to get my key lol. That’s all I have for today!
