STA Blog

Week 2: Web Dev Basics

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For my second week, I have been learning and practicing new skills for Web Dev Basics assignments.

Github is one of my favorite tool. It is the tool to share your coding project and for developers to work on their projects.

I have uploading my first repository to share some information about myself and also practice using Github to upload my future coding projects.

I have also learnt so many new things about the Website such as Clients and Servers, DNS, and Component Files,…

To reflect my understanding for Website, I made a powerpoint to summary everything I learnt.

After that, Inspect was the next tool that I learnt and applied. I could see the component files of a website using Inspect and know how to do changes on the website.

Last but not least, I really enjoy learning and practicing Web Accessibility Standards assignment. It provides a lot of valuable information about how we should design our website,  the format of the information we want to share on our website.

I had the opportunity to work on analyzing different infographics and what we should do to improve the site’s accessibility. With the feedback from Ingrid, I have learnt a lot about the need of using Tab key to navigate where the users are on the website.

Overall, I have learnt a lot of valuable skills and hopefully I can apply them to produce the best products for the LAITS team. 🙂

 

Photo IDs

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Photo IDs

Here are some Photo ID’s I worked on recently. The one on the right was especially interesting since the photo they submitted did not follow the ID guidelines of having the subject centered in the photo. But since it was an overall good, well lit, image, I decided not to ask for a replacement one and instead improvise and add in some background on Photoshop.

 

Germanic Studies Flyer and Graphics Pt.4

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Germanic Studies Flyers Pt.4

Project: Germanic Studies Flyer
Client: Dr. Hans C. Boas
Completion Status: Done!
Staff Guidance: Suloni Robertson
STA Team Members: Cristina (t’is I)
Description/Plans: To create the design for “Level Up” campaign promoting and explaining the path students can take to get a German major and/or certificate.

 

So, forget everything I said in Pt.3 of this saga… big changes were made since then…

 

For reference, the image to the left is what the flyer looked like over a month ago, when I sent this version the client’s way. But, at some point near mid-March, we were approached once again asking for the following few final edits:

– Flip the “hill climb” so that it reads from left-right (ascending)

– Change the header to “Level up to a German (Double) Major”

– Make the sky blue and the clouds off-white, (going for the Super Mario background look)

– Change the color of the background mountain from purplish brown to shades of a lighter green (or ocher)

– Remove the image of the Berlin TV tower as a whole, and finally

– Replace some of the text and course numbers with their new input

So, I got down to business…

 

 

Apr 20, Note: This week the client for this project reached out once again to let us know there was one final edit they needed for the version published on cascade, so made sure to make that edit and re-upload on the site. Here’s how that looks like now…

 

Also! I was passing through the Texas Union the other day, and I spotted one of the designs in the wild:

 

TIES Lab website

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TIES LAB Website

Project: make a new website for TIES Lab in GRAV
staff guidance: Estella, Christina
description/plans: build a new website in GRAV suing content from the old site

old site

working on the new site locally

I am having difficulties making a submenu like on the old site:

The submenu is generated from the headings on the page, and I’m not sure how I would implement that on GRAV.

 

Week XXVIII

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Week XXIX

A lot to cover – I’ve been very busy!

French Textbook

This one was not too complicated. I used several photos to put together 4 backgrounds from templates with instructions. For a photo editing assignment overseen by Abriella, I didn’t hit too many snags besides taking her suggestions of “50% more/less” very literally.

The template

I don’t know much about the French textbook in general, but it seems I may have some more design tasks coming from it in the future.

PETEX

I haven’t put together a design menu yet, but I finally made some Canvas graphics for this course.

I also began migrating the slides for PETEX, which involved a lot of reformatting. Sonu from the Project Management team helped me with that, and ended up doing most of the work after the first few.

Course Graphics – PHY 317K & PHY 317L: General Physics I and General Physics II

Project: Course Graphics – PHY 317K & PHY 317L: General Physics I and General Physics II
Client /Prof: Viranga Perera
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Stephen J Lundy
STA team members: N/A
description/plans: Design course graphics for PHY 317K & PHY 317L
To be completed:4/1/2022

I haven’t completed the stinger or Canvas buttons for this course yet, but I went through a lot of iterations for the slides graphics. The professor’s request was an electromagnetic wave turning into a lens flare and entering an eyeball. Here’s a few of my drafts, with the most finalized last.

CoLA Web Refresh

The real bulk of what I’ve been doing for 4 weeks, Refresh has mostly been assessing auto-migrated department pages. Currently, I’m working on Psychology, which has a lot of pages with interesting layouts. Especially something like the Books by Faculty page, which we decided we (and by we I mean the full time web developers) would need to make a special element in Pages for. Otherwise, I’ve had some room for creativity adapting some things. One example is this icon on the Psychology homepage:

I thought at first it was just from the video game Portal, but it turns out it’s a free use icon from Noun Project. The auto-migration didn’t handle the thumbnail well (I didn’t screencap before deleting, but it was huge and out of place) so I edited it into an image button masquerading as a text button, using the Pages font (Open Sans) in Photoshop. I could have just deleted it and used a text button, but the little portal guy was too cute to be lost in migration.

Tada!

Blog Banner Change

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Blog Banner Change

One of my recent projects was to edit the blog banner I created last September to reflect our current STAs. This entailed adding in our new STAs Hoa and Keshav, as well as removing some of the STAs that no longer work here/are on hiatus.

This new blog banner looks like this:

The main thing I had to focus on here was balancing it out with less STAs than before. Fortunately, both Hoa and Keshav had larger images which made it easier to keep things visually cohesive. I’ll be excited to see how we design our banner for Summer 2022!