STA Blog

October 31st Update

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Life & Letters Mobile Prototype

project: Life & Letters Mobile Prototype
Client /Prof: Allen Quigley
completion status: Started Oct. 3
staff guidance: Stacy, Suloni
STA team members: Kevin!
description/plans: create an Adobe Xd prototype for the Life & Letter Allen’s  Illustrator mockups for Stacy and Kevin to use for development
To be completed: 

Allen’s Design:

Here is the link for the prototype/mockup: https://xd.adobe.com/view/394a2a17-75d1-40ec-4ae8-d0fde51866df-4f7b/

And the link for development: https://xd.adobe.com/spec/8970dc6d-3601-4b49-5a6a-dbef6d2b4271-ff41/

I attempted minor edits to the main nav and footer for an overall cohesive and sleek feel.

 

University Writing Center Site Redesign

project: University Writing Center Site Redesign

Client /Prof: Rachel Forsyth and Vicente Lozano–UWC folks
completion status: Started Oct. 3
staff guidance: Stacy, Valerie
STA team members: n/a
description/plans: work with Stacy to develop a new design system for the UWC site that best meets undergrad student, grad student, faculty, and consultant needs while remaining inviting. This can be done through better university affiliation, simplified navigation, concise and helpful copy, visual interest, and people-centered design. (Really excited about this one!)
To be completed: 

Current Site: http://uwc.utexas.edu
Overall feel: friendly, caring, tidy
Initial Meeting notes:
WordPress site
Part of Dept. of Rhetoric and Writing
Updated by Rachel currently, need for styles to be defined/something to pass down to maintain site.need an updated site map, some pages are out of commission or can be compiledStyle: More university affiliation, while up-keeping a conversational, friendly tone

Users:

  • Writing Center Consultants
  • Students
    • both undergrad + grad (grads have additional resources, what the undergrads have + extras)
    • return users vs. new
  • Faculty
Main uses:
  • Appointments
  • Presentations
  • Policies
  • Handouts (used by consultants to then give out physical copies of to students)
To solve:
  • Rethinking navigational organization (perhaps additional menu(s))
  • Problems in the past with finding information/difficulty navigating the site with the main nav.
  • cohesive styles
  • making it more attractive for grad students (fairly newly added as a resource)–letting them know that the UWC serves them, too!
  • need to keep in mind the need for faculty to recognize this as a service for the entire campus (be careful about including department logos; don’t want to demotivate)
  • don’t like all the accordions
  • needs to be able to be easily maintained
Initial thoughts:
  • homepage as ad for service
    • where it can be obvious this service is for grad students, too!
  • produce a style guide and page templates for easier project handoff and application
  • more visual interest!
  • possibly another menu for main/general uses
  • “Make an Appointment” definitely needs to be a menu item

Responsiveness progress – header restyling

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Today I worked on restyling the header. The image next to the text is problematic when responding so I’ve hidden it. I’m thinking of a new style that will suit the page, then I will try to reincorporate the original image. First, I will work out the kinks associated with the multiple divs that make up the header. I will place the image back in once the divs respond in unison.

Fall updates!

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Fall updates!

Over the last view months since my last post, I’ve been chugging away on Vlabs like many of us in the office. Along with reviewing PSDs, building canvassers & performing content checks on the Grav site, I’ve started recoloring the interactives that don’t align with our styling guide. I trained Thuy on Vlabs to help with last looks and PSD asset creation and have assisted Maddy with completing last minute tasks to get this site up and ready for students.

A part from Vlabs, I’ve worked on various assignments over the past view months. I’ve included details of each below!

Help Guides

After receiving comments from faculty on staff regarding their difficulties using COlA, I created a few help guides for faculty to refer to when using the COLA web editor. The first guide explains how to edit, add & delete a faculty or staff members display title listed on their profile pages & search results. The guide following this image outlines the process for faculty or web staff to add, edit & delete categories such as faculty affiliation or rank.

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/web-admin-help/how-to-use-the-web-editor/editing-display-title-categories.phpDSBanner-Final

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

Updated Caricature, Blog Banner & STA Avatar Banner

At the start of the semester, I felt my blog needed some beautifying. I created a new blog banner and caricature to practice using the drawing pad & illustrate my new haircut! It was a fun project that gave me a nice break from more administrative duties and expanded my skills in Photoshop. Additionally, the STAs each created a new design for our  2019-2020 STA blog banner. We submitted the designs anonymously and mine received the highest vote! This reassures me that my Photoshop skills and experience with graphic design are steadily improving!

Photo Ids

Throughout October, I’ve edited and completed several Photo ID requests shown below.

Digital Studies Flyer & Website Banner

I was assigned to create a website banner, logo & flyer for the new study programs offered through Digital Studies at UT. This project has gone through many iterations so I’ve included multiple versions of the resulting designs. The flyer was created to advertise the Graduate Certificate program in Digital Studies and the Web banner as well as the twitter logo where designed to represent all programs within the Digital Studies field at UT.

     

 

McCombs Studio Testing 2

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Color Testing Update

It turns out the initial screen I was color testing on had a completely different color profile than most other screens in the office – so while my first round of color edits looked ok to me, the photo highlights looked green or red on most other screens.

 

After talking to some LAITS people who knew more about the screens’ color profiles, I stopped playing with hue/saturation and brightness/contrast settings. The screens don’t get “brighter” per say, because pure white/”brightness” only appears as blue. I used a tan and black gradient map and lowered the green/blue highlights and raised red highlights in curves to achieve this effect. The contrast is also nicer on camera now. Knowing how tricky color balancing a neutral like this is on the screens I’m happy with these results!

 

PSY 352: Abnormal Psychology Online Course Materials

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PSY 352: Abnormal Psychology Online Course Materials

Project: PSY 352: Abnormal Psychology Online Course Materials

Client: Dr. Christopher Beevers, COLA Department of Psychology

Completion status: started October 29th, 2019

STA team members: Olivia Wilczek, Abriella Corker, Jalisa Broussard, Kevin Dao, Jaclyn Alford

Description / plans: create materials for the PSY 352 online course (going live in Spring 2020). Project include reformatting PPT slides, designing studio backdrop, desk skirt, intro video, etc.

Yesterday I started on the first draft of the PPT template for the course. Once this is approved and modified as needed, I will assign these out to the STAs team members to help me reformat all of Dr. Beevers’ slides. I myself am also working on a few slides set, just so that I know what issues can be encountered on the way.

As a side note, I’m a PPT nerd, so I’m super excited to work on this project 😉

I also created a spreadsheet for housekeeping purposes.

And finally, some organization stuff to get everyone ready to create the PPTs.

vLabs and Cascade Help Requests

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Hello,

 

In the past week, I’ve been working on Cascade help requests as well as some Canvasser modules. For the Cascade help requests, there’s a Sanskrit Gallery page that was transferred from an older platform onto Cascade. Through this process, the image descriptions became hidden from the user unless they hovered over the image with their cursor for a few seconds. The client wanted to add the description onto the image so that it’s easily visible. I went through and parsed out the descriptions (which contained HTML tags) and formatted it so that it’s easily readable. Here they are:

 

 

Also, I spent some time working on a Canvasser module (Lab 9 Section 6) which was missing popups for every data point on the graph.

For every point on the data table, I had to create an ‘overlay’ photo, as well as a popup window with the correct information from the original vLabs module. Frankly this was a little bit of a tedious process, but it was a nice change of pace to work in Photoshop for a bit!