These are for the upcoming STA
Assignment to design a self portrait for the new blog banner, which should be up soon! The second part of the assignment was to create a form that you would find in the “garden of your imagination.” I drew a tree because I like trees…
Here’s my updated caricature, with my ‘spirit animal.’
We are going to be updating the STA homepage banner to remove past STAs and add new ones. This semester the update includes adding a creature to go along with our caricature person. Of course, mine had to be a beetle. This is what it ended up looking like:
I have made a design template so that other STAs who start making customized zoom backgrounds for professors can keep consistency with their design. All of the backgrounds we make need to fall under UT branding guidelines and contain that department’s branded logo. The way the template is laid out now offers designers the ability to input an image of their choice and turn it grayscale, then choose a UT brand color to overlay on top at 75% opacity, and lastly apply a white knock-out in the top left corner. Images can be of their choosing or the professors as long as it is copy-right and credit free.
Here are photos of me testing out how the backgrounds look once placed in zoom. The top right-hand corner did not feel natural in position for me and I assume that it wouldn’t for most people who use it, so the left side is the standard for this. We can also move it to the right side upon request if the user feels the positioning is off to them.
I haven’t been doing a great job at updating my blog this semester. Needless to say, a LOT of stuff has happened since my last post.
When I originally started the Ancient Currencies project, it was supposed to be a 1-2 week project that Stacy gave me to keep me busy until I started my official duties as remote STA and Cascade advisor. I managed to do a lot of progress in those first 2 weeks and the goal of having a Minimum Viable Product for the site was achieved in time to show the client. I based my original design in the Google currency converter, it looked like this:
While this design was a good start, we quickly realized that being able to convert between two unknown ancient currencies didn’t really give any useful information to the user. Instead, we decided to make the user choose a single currency and then convert it to others in the same period as well as different commodities (salaries, food, goods) to give the user a better perspective of what it was worth. I also added a useful map to visually display the regions and made the period selector actually work. This is the second iteration as of now:
This has been 3/4 a semester’s worth of work. While there are still lots of little things that I need to implement in order to get the site ready to release one of them stands above the others: URL path functionality. In short, whenever a user selects a currency they should be able to copy the URL, send it to someone and have the site load on the same currency again. This might sound simple but there’s a lot of things that need to happen in order for it to work, especially on a site with no backend (doesn’t refresh).
I am honestly really proud of how far this project has come. Mostly, I’m proud that I’ve managed to bring it this way with minimal help from Stacy or anyone else in the LAITS team. I feel like this is a proof of how far I’ve come as a frontend developer. The project is a nice way to close my time as an STA (since I graduate this semester). I’ll post an update sometime later.