Hans Boas is having a presentation printed out and in this document he needed some graphs re-designed for a BW format at half a page size. He requested only outlined boxes and more on the plain side. I kept the formatting of the graph the same since the supplemental text he supplied followed with the graph nicely.
Project: UT Dana Center Carnegie Layouts (1/3 of Dana Center projects)
Client: Dana Center (Alison Cothe is principal contact)
Completion Status: In progress
Staff Guidance: Suloni (art director), Maddy (project assistance and InDesign guru)
STA Team Members: Rachel, Cristina, Abriella
Description/Plans: So! The UT Dana Center is a center at UT that (simplistically put) works to reduce educational disparities by taking action in mathematics and science curricula across TX and US in under served communities. LAITS is now taking on 3 projects related to designing InDesign layouts for their content, as well as creating a few infographics.
We are still in the early stages of this project, but I have helped with project management and assistance w/ this, creating Box folders and a spreadsheet to track our progress. I am focusing on project assistance but am also getting trained w/ Rachel on InDesign so I can do hands-on design work if needed!
So, this week I’ve been bopping around. I’ll detail my work below more coherently, but for a TL;DR: continuing to pen the accessibility training (it’s almost ready to go online!), helping with project management on a new service center project, and editing photo IDs.
But first, have a low quality photo of me and Bucky a moment before he leapt for freedom
Accessibility Training
So this is really exciting for me! Maddy, Suloni, and Estella have been kind enough to let me spend more work hours than I probably should have on writing an accessibility training for designers. This is really an area close to my heart, because I’ve decided it’s the area in which I would like to pursue a career. It really combines a lot of areas I love, such as research and writing, design and development, and client communication.
This overview covers a quick summary of legal requirements and W3C recommendations, as well as more hands-on steps STAs can take to ensure accessibility. If anyone wants to chat more about web accessibility and what it means beyond not getting legal action for violations, let me know!
After the past round of feedback with the client, his team met up and were able to discuss some more changes they wanted to see from the flyer. They said their favorite version was Option 2 in Red, so I took that as the base design to make the new requested changes, such as:
1. Using brighter/more saturated colors
2. Adding a round sun with rays
3. Adding round clouds
4. Adding the Berlin TV Tower
5. Fixing “GER 604: Accelerante First-Year German,” and
6. Adding a QR Code Placeholder
Before… 
After…
I’ll let you know what they think of this as soon as they respond. For now, that’s all folks! 🙂
I’ll be honest; The combination of winter break, a new spring schedule, a new phase of CoLA Refresh, and then a 2 day campus closure have all really thrown off my mental clock. It doesn’t help that, sadly, for scheduling reasons I am not able to attend the weekly design meetings this semester :C
My last update was about 3 weeks ago, and I’ve done a few things since then, but a lot of my workload is very multi-step and not quite finished enough to summarize.
The client clarified they wanted photo graphics for this one, which I was… struggling with. I really didn’t have a good frame of reference for how to make text + photo look good, and all my initial attempts were very flat. 
I tried searching for references on design sites like Behance, but came up with a lot of illustrative graphics still, collages and vector graphics with photos thrown in. Some of the flashier designs had typography too complex to be a powerpoint template, too. 
I started a design based off this grid illustration, but didn’t finish before Maddy showed me her draft.
Which was so good, I asked if we could just use that for the course. She told me to look at magazine covers for future reference, if I’m looking for trendy text+photo layouts.
The grid DID find some use as a content slide background. I did get to use my grainy paper texture from the old pipe illustration, eventually…
This was not actually my project, but I made some minor edits to the canvas graphics for a new professor. The original graphics were done by Abriella, and I just wanted them on my blog because they look nice, but also, I know Michele! Or, at least, I took 1 Greek archaeology class she TA’d for. Makes me jealous I’m not in this class!
It’s also a good example of the little design jobs I’m able to do now. I may be doing some tech support for CoLA Refresh this coming spring too, so if I don’t update on every minor task, I’ll pluck out the most interesting ones.
Following up on prior blogs about the logo design, click the link to view what we submitted to the team: https://www.canva.com/design/DAE3PTaZU7o/4aV3J-NQJl67cUpPqA__oQ/view?utm_content=DAE3PTaZU7o&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=publishpresent#9