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

Training: Cascade

By

Today I ran through a lot of information with Bridget and Valerie on Cascade and V-Labs. They have been extremely helpful in answering my questions and now it is all a matter of practice and picking up how to do things efficiently. There is a bit of struggle in trying to get things to work and do what I want, because every detail needs to be exact on photoshop and cascade for things to upload and format correctly. However, with every struggle is another step closer to learning how to do things the right way!

Here is a link to the Cascade site that I a working on. It will be updated as the days go on and I continue to practice uploading and editing things.

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/sta-6/

 

Vlabs UI

By

Virtual Labs UI Update

 

Here is an update on the UI design for the Virtual Labs site. Since my last update we have decided to use only one color of the four presented. We went with the teal color as we believed it offered the bet contrast for screen visibility. In addition, Suloni had some notes for me, primarily reemphasizing the lab numbers in the navigation bar and main menu. Below are the changes out into effect.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I spent some of Friday updating my mockup and prototype of the site. I made sure everything was consistent with the styling of the interactives. This entailed small changes including updating the font size, line height, padding, etc. Below you can see all the pages laid out in the order of their flow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As of now, I have a mockup for the homepage and what a lab section will look like. This week I will focus on designing a couple more pages and assets needed for the new site’s design. This includes a resources page, glossary, credits, and a min-max button. You can click on the homepage below to navigate through the prototype.

 

 

 

Training: Painting

By

This is a painting done on Adobe Photoshop with the Wacom tablet of the beetle Goliathus goliatus, one of my favorite insects. I used dry brush painting tools to create this image starting with a trace layer, adding on base colors, and then shadows and highlights. I think this training by far has been my most favorite because I enjoy drawing a lot and feel like there’s more versatility in drawing with pen. However, there is still a lot for me to try out so there may be something that is even better or as equally fun to do. Hopefully in the future the opportunity to create more illustrations will be handed to me in an assignment. For now this is what I came up with and am pleased with how it turned out.

Training: Photo ID and Buttons

By

On the left in blue are the buttons that I manipulated as directed in my instructions given to me. The image on the right is what the template layout was originally. The button colors were picked from a color template set.

Other things I did today…photo ID editing! Chloe Kim showed me how to touchup, resize and format, as well as notify the people about the photos. Thanks!

Training: Color Wheel and Tracing

By

Today I worked on tracing an image and turning it into a stamp to be reused in a composition. Additionally, two color wheels were created using Photoshop and Illustrator. These are my first works done on the two adobe programs here at this job. Slowly but surely I am getting the hang of things and will learn a lot while here.

Orientation Day

By

 

Today was my first day with the team. We went over the workspaces that I will be using and setting up different profiles. I’m very excited to start my journey here and see how it evolves over time. Everybody is super helpful and there is a very friendly atmosphere in the office.

Here is a powerpoint I worked on over the STA Handbook:

2019-Jul9-AbriellaCorker