It’s my last full week here before winter break! Here’s what I’ve been up to this week:
In other news, I left The Daily Texan on Friday after two years. 🙁 You can read my -30- column here (what we write when we leave the paper to say goodbye).
This week I finished up my graphic for the History of Design training.
For the paper background, I drew a rectangle, filled it with a beige color, added a grainy texture with Effect -> Texture -> Grain, and then blurred it with Effect -> Blur -> Smart Blur…
I added the hat. I made the spotlight by using two trapezoids filled black and at 50% opacity. Maddy showed me how to make the mustache smoother by going to Object > Path > Simplify.
Maddy suggested I practice the Rule of Thirds.
Loosely inspired by The Twilight Zone, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”
There isn’t really an intermediate KB training, so I explored on my own. While working for the Blanton, I didn’t really get many chances to really explore WordPress because I was mostly just migrating content.
I edited the stylesheet to change the colors and added a blurry glass effect to the page. I took a bit of time to find the styles that I needed to change since the stylesheet had 6000+ lines.
Project: Updating the Client Communications KB
Client: Internal/Design STA program
Completion Status: In progress…
Staff Guidance: Suloni Robertson
STA Team Members: Cristina (it me), Angie Huang, Ingrid
Description/Plans: To revamp the client communications KB.
I didn’t drink my poetry juice this morning, so I don’t think I can rhyme this whole post. But it is December now (woo hoo!), so that’s just a little holiday reference for you. Anyhow, let’s get to it…
A long time ago I wrote my first KB: Basics of Client-Based Project Communication. Well, a few weeks ago Angie was tasked to revamp it and make it into a training. So, since I was the original writer, I was brought in as a consultant. But these days, my main task has been to remake and improve the example images. So, without further a do, here are the original ones compared to the new ones. Enjoy…
As you can see, some of the mayor changes I made were on the colors and position of the annotations. Angie and I agreed that moving the notes to a single side would make it look cleaner, and getting rid of the colored text would reduce confusion since some topics would land on blue on one image, but the same topic would be a different color on the next and stuff. So, yeah. I’m still waiting on some feedback and stuff, but…
I have officially completed all 33 design trainings that we have along with 7/12 of the web dev trainings!
I believe angie may have made this training. It goes over masking and the puppet pin tool to create motion graphics in the form of a course banner. I think the puppet tool has been the most useful for me to learn as I feel that it allows for more range of motion in individual elements in a graphic.
Shapes and Patterns
Staff: Ingrid
Description: I learned about different shapes, the feelings they evoke, and how to effectively use shapes to create hierarchy/enhance design.
Some patterns I created for this training:
