I recently made a PowerPoint on French Terminology for the French course. At first, I had made all the calendar assets but Yazz suggested we use screen shots of google calendar in French instead so we went with that. This is how the PowerPoint turned out, feedback is pending.
I’ve been working on Dana Center Carnegie Case Studies.
In case you aren’t familiar with the project, Dana Center has funding and a need for 3 separate content design/InDesign layout projects. One of them, Arkansas, has already been completed by my lovely coworker Rachel!
That leaves the Carnegie and Strategic Direction projects. I’m not going to go in depth about the latter, since it’s an infographic centered project led by Cristina and Rachel at the moment. The Carnegie project includes 4 case studies on “Math for Manufacturing: Workforce and Higher Education Partnerships” and 1 process document. We have received content for 3 case studies.
This week I spent much of the time working on the first case study, on KY FAME.
I used Rachel’s Style B template, which had been approved for this project. However, I made some alterations on the template level as I went on, refreshing myself on paragraph and character styles as well as a little bit of GREP. For a project like this, one of the biggest concerns and most important components is consistency. To some degree, I can ensure this automatically, but I’ve also been taking notes on style in order to prepare a comprehensive style guide to accompany the 3 case studies.
I also received some pretty fast feedback from Ophella (a writer at the Dana Center) and Alison (main client), which helped guide refinement of my draft.
This project was a bit out of my comfort zone, I haven’t worked with InDesign since doing a basic training on it almost 2 years ago, so it’s definitely been a work in progress; however, so far, I am happy with my progress and the results!
Over the past week and a half I have also been working on creating the PowePoints for the French course as the requests come in. Some of these have a 4-5 business day turnaround. Last week I got about 5 to do by today the 16th when I’m posting this. I got them all day with approval from the client and had time to make the individual title cards using the corresponding background for the different weeks they get used. While doing this I went ahead on how to make the title cards for these, the overall template can still be flushed out.
Over the past week and a half, I created a template to turn out 4 different studio backdrops per unit lesson for the French online courses. Each week Yazz adds images to a folder for a certain city with images to use and then I create the basecamp and use the template I made to create them. Adrian has helped me with one yesterday which was very helpful. Hopefully, as this goes on other STAs will have an easier time understanding and using the template. I am also updating the template for clarity as I see how people respond to it. I’ve made about 24 backdrops on top of PowerPoints and title cards.
Hello blog! I promise someday I will be better at keeping up with you. Recent activities:
Dana Center Carnegie Work
So far I’ve been on the sidelines of this project, but starting next Monday I’m going to start entering and formatting content for Carnegie case studies using templates made by Rachel. We ran into some roadblocks with not having updated InDesign on any of the Design Lab machines, so I’m either going to bring my laptop next week or work on a computer Mike set up in a studio on the 4th floor.
COLA Web Refresh
Chris and Michelle have Adrian and I working on reformatting the LACS “Where Students Intern” site. Here is the current site. Each “review” is a separate page in Cascade (currently here). The new, redesigned site will include accordions instead of separate pages. Screenshot (below). This is a fairly time-consuming task, because it’s full of a lot of information.
Personal News
On a more personal note, I’ve received an offer from GBH’s National Center for Accessible Media, a consulting group for digital accessibility efforts within a public broadcasting organization. I have a start date of May 30th at their Boston office, with the job title of Accessibility Analyst :~) I can’t overstate how excited and grateful I am for this opportunity. Thank you so much to Suloni, Valerie, and Michelle for being my references!!
For the Strategic Direction portion of the Dana Center project, I am tasked with creating infographics based on the information they have given us. For this first infographic, I am working with what Cristina left off with, and building off the feedback I got on some previous work of mine.
My first drafts looked like this:
Maddy took this and made a few drafts where she made it look a bit like puzzle pieces. We particularly liked the “magical” looking inverted version, so we decided to work based on that one:
Here is the black and white draft I made based on what Maddy created in photoshop:
And here is the first draft of the colored version (very rough)
