STA Blog

more tbh designing

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The client wanted depth added to the elements; not gaudy and not minimal

After chatting with Suloni, we decided to get rid of the border to give elements more space and to use styling from the Texas Beyond History site.

Arkansas Progress

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Arkansas Progress: Client Changes

On Wednesday and Friday, I made quite a few alterations to the Dana Center Arkansas pages based off of the requests by the client. The primary changes they were looking for were to make room for citations in the bottom of the second page of both sets of pages. This required me to rethink how the pages were structured slightly, and also change some of the margins. Fortunately, the clients also shortened much of the text, which made it quite a bit easier to make room for citations. Besides changing the citations, the clients also had some wording and design change requests, and wanted unique titles for each cover page (previously, the cover pages had been the same for both sets of pages.) The current drafts look like this:

Set 1:

Demystifying the Myths about Quantitative Literacy: Facts That Dispel Commonly Held Beliefs 

Set 2:

Demystifying the Myths about Quantitative Literacy: Different Journeys for Students

Currently, I am waiting to hear back from our clients about any further changes to make to these pages. I will update my blog about these changes ASAP!

EDIT: 3/9/22

After hearing back from our client, I made a few more changes to these pages. These namely were changes with the citations:

In my old draft, I had make some mistakes with the bulleting:

As you can see here, InDesign accidentally bulleted every single line rather than the sentences I specified. I fixed that in this draft!

I also fixed a few other formatting things, such as alignment and font sizing. I am sending this back to the client, and will update once more depending on how it goes.

Welcome Keshav!

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Hi Keshav!
Welcome to the STA Blog! This the page where your blog posts will published.
Toward the end of your STA Orientation, you’ll design and upload a banner to go at the top of this page.

Upload a Blog Banner

Step One: Design Your Banner in Photoshop

Use these Photoshop specs when you’re making your banner:

    • Your banner should be 780 pixels wide (the height doesn’t matter)
    • Must include your name, your major, and your expected graduation year
    • Your banner should reflect who you are (your personality, interests or major)
    • Make sure to save your banner for the web (i.e. File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy))
    • If you save your banner as a JPG, make sure sure the quality is high (i.e. at least 60)

Step Two: Save Your Banner

  • There are two places you can save your completed projects: UT Box and the LAITS server. You’ll be given a personal folder in both locations. For now, you only have to save your banner to UT Box, but you may have to access the server at some point in the future.

Accessing UT Box

Accessing the LAITS server

  • Accessing the LAITS server from off-campus is slightly more complicated.
    • You’ll need to be registered with Duo if you aren’t already (you can register here).
    • Then you’ll need to connect to the UT VPN and the LAITS server. The videos below will walk you through how to do that:
    •  Then navigate to your STA volume folder and save
      • smb://file.laits.utexas.edu/sta/Adrian Mckee
    • Save your banner both as an image and an unmerged PSD

Step Three: Upload Your Banner to the STA Blog

  • Log in the the STA Blog here. You should’ve received an email confirming your new WordPress account with your username and assigned password. If didn’t get it or you can’t log in, ask Suloni or another STA.
  • You’ll be able to change your password anytime by going to Users > Your Profile > Account Management > New Password.

Uploading media and banners in WP

  • Read these links before you upload your banner.
  • They will walk you through how to upload media to your blog.

How to Upload a Homepage Banner

Adding New Posts and Media

Make Your First Blog post

  • Reflect on the day. You blog posts will be a documented experience of your time as an STA with LAITS. They can include anything you want to share about the projects you’re working on, and the more media (screenshots, images, links, videos, gifs) you can use, the better.
  • For today, write a bit about about yourself and what you did during orientation.
  • If you haven’t already, upload your banner.

Things to Remember

Image Specs

  • You should never copy and paste images intoto your blog. Always upload images into the media section of blog first (Click on the add media button), then insert the image from the media folder to display on your blog.
  • Don’t use the thumbnail version of your images.
  • Use images that are 72 dpi
  • Screenshots are fine
  • Images that are 780 pix wide format nicely above or below text blocks

Always Categorize Your Posts

  • Always check the category “2019 Fall-Winter | Spring-Summer 2020” on the blog posts you make this summer. This is the only category you need to check.
  • Make sure your posts are categorized correctly so that all of your work is documented in the correct semesters.

Commenting on Basecamp

Notification comments: etiquette, files, questions, feedback

Let us know when you’ve completed this task by adding a link to your blog to a comment in Basecamp.
Notes for all comments in Basecamp:
  • Always address the person/people you are writing to by their names.
  • Always use complete sentences.
  • Always add links or paths to your design file in your STA folder.
  • Make it easier for your collaborators and mentors to give you feedback on a design by adding screenshots to your comment.

 

Notify people in Basecamp by adding the @ symbol before their names (no spaces), otherwise they may not see your comment.

@ your STA mentor and Suloni in your comments when you want to:

  • ask us questions about the mechanics of using the STA blog,
  • about the mechanics of photoshop,
  • to let us know that you have completed this task,
  • or that you would like a little feedback on on your banner design 🙂

Thank you & have fun!

UTFC PowerPoints

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UTFC PowerPoints

Yazz, one of our clients provided me with a list of classroom objects and digital classroom objects she needed images for to be translated into a PowerPoint and projected onto a green screen. We tried to get as many images in a single photo as possible. Commercial use attribution-free images were harder to find for the digital version so some only have 3 or less on a slide. I had about 4 days to make two different powerpoints.

 

 

Another list was provided with the numbers 1-20. They wanted to use dice to represent this and luckily Valerie had a 20 sided die? dice? and took photos for me to place inside the PowerPoint. Yazz came back with a request to fill in the numbers to be black so I added in that. I also added a throwing the dice animation for each slide so they are more interactive.

https://utexas.box.com/s/0iquk47fjowthqv5bjn9k7rsbxplzqev

 

French Textbook Map Update

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French Textbook Map Final Version

The French textbook map is has been completed and will be used on the platform Lingco as supplementary material. The first two images were the maps I was given to combine into a single image. It contained a lot of detailed names of places I had to type out and sometimes look up because the text was too pixelated and monuments that I had to illustrate and rasterize by hand. The clients were satisfied with how the map looked so I moved forward with adjustments on contrast so that maps legend and features are distinguishable among different color-blindnesses. I found that it’s not so much saturation that matters than it is the contrast in values. I made the railway stations a lot brighter against the background. I also darkened all the text.

 

Here are what the maps look like in the different simulators:

Week XXVI

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Week XXVI

Sort of? I’ll say this covers the week of 2/28-3/03. That’s good enough.

SPN 367C: Spanish for Health Care Professions

We’re waiting on final client feedback, but this one is pretty much wrapped up. I was proud enough to overcome my laziness and actually assemble a design menu for one!

CoLA Web Refresh: Phase III

Not too much to report here yet, but we’re troubleshooting auto-migrated sites and logging how long it takes to go through different sizes of directories. I didn’t make this spreadsheet, so I haven’t bothered to elaborately color-code it yet :p

Norwegian Flyer Design Request

Project: Norwegian Flyer Design Request
Client /Prof: Boas, Hans C
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Suloni Robertson
STA team members: N/A
description/plans: Design a promotional flyer for one of the smaller COLA languages in order to boost enrollment.
To be completed: April 4th

Pretty straightforward – this is the example given by the client. 

They wanted a theme of Norwegian nature/scenery. I was very disappointed to find out John Bauer was Swedish, not Norwegian, but looking more into fairy tale illustrators I remembered Theodor Kittelsen, who did some very nice landscapes too. These 2 are my main drafts for the first round of client feedback, 1 painting and 1 photo.

Lastly, at Suloni’s suggestion, I tried incorporating some Norwegian embroidery and an aurora borealis. Not sure how they look together, but I may end up using the elements in other ways.