STA Blog

First Day as STA

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Hello!

I am Mounika and today is my first day at LAITS as STA. It was nice meeting everyone! We set up all the accounts, read the STA handbook and I was given a tour of all the offices.

I am working on creating my own test site in Cascade and creating a banner in Photoshop.

In the coming days, I will be exploring more about Cascade and Cola Web Editor.

Thanks for reading!

2-18-20

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Published two new pages in the COLA Help Guides based on help request we’ve been getting from faculty:

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/web-admin-help/how-to-use-cascade/advanced-topics/creating-a-box-widget.php

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/web-admin-help/how-to-use-the-web-editor/delegates.php

Also (mostly) finished adding this basic training guide (on making a gif in Photoshop) to the Knowledge Base:

http://sites.la.utexas.edu/kb/2020/02/04/create-your-own-animated-gif/

Post-meeting changes

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After meeting with Stacy, he suggested a few more improvements to the German FrameNet website. The “recent news” section hides some segments when the page width is reduced, in order to make the remaining segments more readable. Also, I created another version of the logo that has a white background which is used when the page responds. Lastly, I evened out the left-hand margins so that all the content starts at the same place.

       

STA Roster Poster Spring 2020

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STA Roster Poster Spring 2020

I’ve been working with Maddy on the STA Spring Roster Poster. Mike wanted a poster related to the word ‘Champion,’ so I drew inspirations from retro style posters. Maddy was also on the same page where she drew inspirations from the Olympics, and so Valerie let us work together on the poster. Here’re the latest two versions.

Maddy worked mostly on the main components of the poster (pictures and the ring illustrations on the left as well as the ‘projecting’ background), while I worked on the header / footer typography and the small icon in the bottom right corner. We’re giving Mike both versions to see which one he likes better and we’ll go from there :). We both really like the poster so far!

Epic Similes UI/UX

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Epic Similes UI/UX

I’m starting to design the UI/UX for Dr. Deborah Beck’s online database of epic similes in Greek literature. We met last week with her to see what she wanted from the site.

 

She told us the purpose of the site is when somebody is reading and they see a simile that interests them or is relevant to their research, they could go on the site and search the simile to learn more about it from her classification system. For example, you read “Achilles is like a bird” in the Iliad. You could then go to the site and can search for details about that simile.

 

She also wants users to have a lot of discoverability of the other data; so from a user’s first search they could easily stumble into other similes also in the Iliad, or about Achilles, or birds, etc. The site is mostly for academic use, so users will be scholars and undergrads. She wants the site to feel fun and interactive while you read.

 

Here is its current design. There is lots of extraneous data and unhelpful search options.

 

 

 

Below are some sketches and a rough Adobe XD layout for now. I am waiting for Dr. Beck to sort through what data she needs on the website and send it over, so until then the content on these drafts is TBD. I’m most excited for paring down the search options and improving the UX for each search category.

 

 

 

 

 

Project: Epic Similes Database
Client/Prof: Dr. Deborah Beck
Completion status: beginning
Staff guidance: Suloni Robertson, Valerie Tran, Chris Pittman
STA team members: Me and Jake Engelberg
Description/plans: Create an online database to host Dr. Beck’s research over epic similies in Greek literature.
To be completed: End of summer