The French Textbook course is doing recordings in the LAITS studio for their online classes and needed a backdrop. Yazz provided me with some images that they wanted to be transformed into some sort of collage. I pretty much had free range on the layout of it so I decided to do a geometric collage, a watercolor style collage, and a more integrated landscape-type collage. From there I made different coloring adjustments as they got feedback after test recordings.
Back from a long break and ready to work.
Will be working with Texas Beyond History with Ruben, Estella and Suloni.
The French textbook team wanted to enhance how they organize their content by adding visual aids of icons for every kind of assignment or action the students were going to take as they go through the book. The original online book had icons but they were far more generalized and didn’t clearly indicate the tasks the students needed to take. I worked closely with Pat Kyle and Yazz to come up with the design of each icon and we organized our entire feedback system using excel.
Valerie had initially created the re-design for Tex and Tammy on Procreate. I used her stylistic details such as brush texture and line-weight to influence the design of the icons. Eventually, the team decided on a two-toned color icon with a hand-drawn look similar to that of Tex and Tammy. I used the same procreate software as Valerie and exported all the files as .psds for Box.
Below is the fully complete and approved grayscale version of all the icons needed to be made:
As for coloring, the team was stuck on whether they wanted to go the UT color route or the Lingco site color route. I helped in the decision process by clarifying that the UT color palette was limited to two-tone color options for the number of different colors needed. The university palette only uses blues, orange, yellow, green, and gray. The Lingco color palette had 6 colors that were more saturated and easier to turn into two-toned combinations for the icons. It also made more sense to create iconography that color-matched with the site it was going to be one. In the end, we went with the Lingco color palette below. I also mocked up all color icon versions on an empty Lingco page for the clients viewing.
Once the approved of the way the colors looked on the icons, I spent 3 shifts re-coloring, exporting, and systematically naming all the icons and filing them in Box. It was the most laborious part of the design process but worth the effort because now the clients can easily access the icon color they need under the appropriate name. While doing this exporting process I also cleaned up and organized all the layers within the .psd grayscale drafts to make re-coloring easier and more efficient for any future STA in the case they would want these in other color options.
Project: French Textbook
Client /Prof: Pat Kyle
Completion status: Started June 24, 2o21
Staff guidance: Suloni Robertson and Valerie Tran
STA team members: Abriella Corker
Description/plans: Create assets for Lingco such as icons and banners. Tex and Tammy to be redesigned. Online course content such as a green screen map and digital background. Additional assets may follow.
To be completed: May 2022 (Tentative)
20 years ago, the Italian and French departments worked together to make collective content in the form of a textbook called “Francais Interactif”. Now, the content of that textbook is on lingco. French 406, 407, 412K, 317C, etc. are using Lingco
I hope y’all had a lovely winter break! Over winter break, I created animated graphics for two government classes – 360F (Global Governance) and 371U (Politics and Film.)
The concept behind this one was to create a globe which then transitioned into a moving building. In a sense, we were going for a news-intro style introductory video. The first draft looked like this (disregard the 30 second length):
While the basic idea was there, the glow was too strong, and it was lacking the text needed to transition the video into the powerpoint. In the second version, I resolved most of these issues:
We ultimately decided that the glow was a bit too much, so I cut it out in the final version. Additionally, the concepts of the globe felt a bit too abstract compared to very realistic photo of the building. To counteract this, Maddy and I came up with a plan to add features to connect the two concepts better:
— Add images behind the globe that move around and give some color to that part
— Color in the globe greyscale so that it fits in more with the building’s design
Ultimately, we decided not to include the glow at all, as it detracts a bit from the focus of the animation. With this decision made, the video was complete!
Gov 371U was a bit faster of a process than for 360F, as the assets had already been pre-made. What I mainly did was compile the glowing and non-glowing versions of the film image over each other in after effects, which creates an old glowing sign look.
For the first draft, we felt that the glowing signs were a bit too far apart, and that there was not enough of a pause between when the red and yellow lights come on. I was able to fix this in draft 2:
Besides adding length between when the red and yellow lights turn on, I also added length to the beginning part, before any of the lights turn on. A trick I used when making this was applying a “fade-in” effect to some of the lights, while not doing it for others. This helped create a balance where the lights turn on more properly in some parts, and more like an “accidental-shut-off-shut-on” in other parts.
After doing this, the assignment was complete! Now, I am moving on to working on some of the powerpoints for these courses.
Health Care Summit Backdrop
First week back at work! Rachel and I are drafting up Maddy’s backdrop design in Illustrator for the Health Care Summit.
Maddy’s design:
Draft #1 & #2:
