STA Blog

6-18-20

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Basic Trainings

I finally finished the image tracing tutorial! It is published to the KB now. It needed a lot of updates and new screenshots, which took awhile, but I think it’s a lot more comprehensive now. When I was rewriting this basic training, I was trying to organize the steps better and give more context for each step because I think it helps people learn and remember things better (it helps me at least). I also tried to make it more visually interesting and fun.

 

The process for redoing a basic training training is basically 1) Make a draft with an original banner and, if necessary, updated screenshots, 2) Get feedback from the lead STA on Basecamp (Abriella’s is the lead in this case–she’s overseeing all the basic trainings), 3) Make edits and publish the draft, then if we can, 4) Get feedback from somebody who’s actually doing the training.

 

Today I’m going to be adding a few more tips to the gif basic training because another STA (Jake) was going through it and found some features that I missed which are helpful for animating in Photoshop. I also have a 3rd basic training that’s going to be based on a tutorial that Suloni found online, which I’m going to start working on soon. It looks really fun so I’m excited about starting that.

 

KB Table of Contents

Abriella, Maddy and I are also still in the process of revamping the Knowledge Base site. We want the basic trainings to be featured better on the site so they’re easy for new STAs to find, plus we cleared out a lot of outdated posts that were adding clutter to the site.
Here is what the old table of contents looked like. Also, it’s not shown in this screenshot, but the categories in the right sidebar used to be twice as long (we removed a lot of the unnecessary ones)

And here’s the current (but still work-in-progress) table of contents. It is the new landing page of the site. Abriella made the banner, I made the headers and tags, which we may or may not keep in the final design. I thought the tags would be the easiest way to label basic trainings, because you can just copy and paste the tag into the table of contents and the actual post. It’s maybe not the most efficient tagging system, but the WordPress theme this site uses is pretty limited, so there aren’t a lot of options available.

Here’s what the basic trainings could potentially look like if we add the tags to the top of each post:

STA Handbook

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STA Handbook

While prepping for summer orientation, I revamped the STA Handbook design. Since it’s one of the first documents a new STA sees, it deserves some love. It is designed to look like a composition book, full of hand-drawn doodles. Since all STAs are students, I thought this would be a cute and relatable theme and maybe make them feel some common ground with new coworkers.

 

I designed it in Google Slides so it’s extremely easy for team leads to edit in the future.

 

Sexing History

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Sexing History Lesson Plans

Since my last post I have started working full time, mostly helping plan orientation for our new summer hires. There is a lot to prep training ~8 new STAs remotely but I’m excited to meet them and get started!

~

Other than that, I have been designing lesson plans for Sexing History, a podcast unearthing facts about sex and sexuality from the past. They want to offer lesson plans for teachers to teach in tandem with the podcast.

 

I wanted my design to reflect their brand, which utilizes a lot of vintage imagery. So, I opted for a serif font (Garamond) and some detailed page borders/lines to make it look more “traditional.” Still, it needed to be scannable and easy to read, so I split it into two columns and created a system that bolds sources and tools when they are listed in-text. I could imagine a teacher printing this out and wanting to leave notes to them-self while teaching, so left big blank margins for them to do so. I did this work in InDesign and got a lot use out of its rulers and guides feature.

 

 

It is always tricky to lay out large blocks of provided text in a cohesive way, which is most evident on pages 4 and 5. When having to make tough cut-off decisions I opted to keep ideas together over visual design since the document is for practical use, and it being nicely designed is a perk, not necessary for teaching.

 

Blanton Homepage Redesign Updates

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Blanton Homepage Redesign Updates

I worked on revising the drafts I made last week (mostly the Masonry and the TextOverlap drafts) with Stacy’s and Maddy’s suggestions. Here are the final drafts that will be shown to the client tomorrow.

Masonry Grid with Padding.

Masonry Grid with No Padding.

Text Overlapping, asymmetrical and free-style layout.

Updating Cascade

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Cascade Updates

Created instructions based on this notice today. Now faculty and staff can edit profiles looking at instructions that are fitted to their permissions.

“….department staff can edit faculty profiles as well. We don’t have a help page that provides complete guidance from the staff perspective, but from the faculty list view they can reach the same edit view depicted in the documentation Suloni shared.”