STA Blog

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Hello all. Turkey (or tofurkey) day is almost upon us. Have this picture of Pirate judging my music taste.

This past week I’ve been doing a cocktail of things, enumerated below for your benefit:

COLA Web Refresh Project

As the actual migration bit has wrapped up for the Dean’s sites and we have not received any help or support requests, I’ve been reaching out to departments, centers, institutes, programs, and research units to gather contacts for the next phase of the project (to commence in January), as well as assessing each site for size, complexity, etc. I’ve heard back from the majority of the units assigned to me. We will likely try to reach out again sometime after Thanksgiving but before the holidays.

Photo IDs 

There haven’t been any this week 🙁

HIS 314K Zamora 

I reformatted a PPT from this professor on Wednesday.

Pages STA Essentials

A little while back, I sat in on a LAITS / Public Affairs meeting and showed them what I had prepared as a possible resource for CMSTAs present and future. It will ultimately live in the KB. Chris suggested that I add information on exporting image assets as well as max/min image sizes, so I did that as well as adding and adjusting other information on the doc.

I also need to add info on alt text, but I might wait to do that until I meet with Maddy and Estella after Thanksgiving to discuss the accessibility KB (as well as how principles and guidelines of accessibility can be integrated into the STA program more broadly).

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2021/11/19/42613-2/

Design History

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Project: History of Design
completion status: in progress
staff guidance/team: Maddy
description/plans: I went over the history of design to gain a better understanding of different movements and styles that influence designers today, then I made 2 design pieces following styles from my favorite movements: Bauhaus and New Typography.

This is a Bauhaus style poster, a 1919-1933 art movement, this style emphasizes geometric, functional design, and a handcrafted characteristics.

This is a flip text effect inspired by the New Typography movement (1920s-1930s), this movement brought forward the idea of non-traditional text arrangement and sort of break free from the need of symmetry. Typography <3

Photo ID Training

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Training: Photo IDs

Assignment: Take sets of example photos and edit them to fit the LAITS quality guidelines

The important thing for these images is for them to be:

  • Neutral colored (not too warm or too cold)
  • Good, flat lighting
  • Medium or slightly-heightened contrast (higher contrast can appear more professional and attractive)
  • Framed in a visually understandable and appealing manner

There are three photo sets: easy, medium, and hard.

I…accidentally did all four for easy. I will showcase here the two that came out the best.

 

Easy:

Original

Edited: Higher contrast, cropped for LAITS

Original

Edited: Cropped, lighting slightly fixed

Medium:

Original

Edited: Fixed cool tone, higher contrast, edited exposure slightly to reduce blending between shirt and hair, cropped

Original

Edited: Fixed warm sepia tone, contrast, cropped, increased exposure as image was too dark

Difficult:

Original

Edited: exposure, color, contrast, + used blur and brush tools to lower severity of highlights until her skin looked more even, used multiply layers, cropped

This was certainly the most difficult of all of them, but was quite fun to do.

Original

Edited: exposure, lighting, contrast, air-brushed his face to have the lighting more even

This is the non-cropped version. I wanted to share this to show how the door is over-exposed now, but his face is not. If this were in a real ID, you wouldn’t see anything past the first pillar to his left, and the image would work much better over-exposed than under-exposed.

General What-I-Learned:

  • The best colors and contrast levels to use for LAITS photos
  • LAITS cropping and sizing guidelines
  • How to artificially light or darken areas of the face to get a more even lighting
  • Blurring out background elements for the sake of the face standing out more
  • How to use the curves and levels tool to alter gamma and exposure
  • What mid-tones need to be toned down for the sake of having a more neutral color palette in the image.

 

Another week!

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This week

I don’t have a ton of visual things this week, unfortunately. Here’s what I was up to:

  • STA evaluation
  • Feedback on trainings
    • InDesign
    • Typography
    • Photo IDs
    • Web accessibility
  • Meeting with Jacob and Brittany about RSCs
  • Write-ups and edits of Chatter and RSC
  • Got started on Advanced Motion Graphics training

The LRC people got back to me today, and they want some UT campus imagery on the second page to give a light sense of campus, seeing as this program is being advertised to international students. Here are a few images I’m playing with:

I also finished up my crochet blanket last week! Excuse the mess in the photo and the un-weaved in end, but it took me about a month to make (36×48 inches) and I’ll be donating it to the local chapter of Project Linus this week.

megan's crocheted blanket. gray body with mustard yellow pom pom border

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Intro to Websites Training Graphics, and Typography

This week I have been working on graphics for the training “Intro to Websites.” I also had the chance to finish the web development “Intro to Typography” training yesterday. Here are a few of the typefaces and font pairings that I came across during this activity.

 

 

And here are some of the completed (and work in progress) graphics for “Intro to Websites!”

 

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2021/11/16/42482-2/

Week 12

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Project: COLA Website Refresher
Client /Prof: N/A (College of Liberal Arts)
Completion Status: Started August 25, 2021
Staff guidance: Michelle Vanhoose, Chris Rankin
STA team members: Ingrid, Adrian
description/plans: Points of Contact
To be completed: TBD (long-term)

Hey everyone. This past week I’ve mostly been working on COLA tasks and a few trainings. For COLA I’ve been fixing links for pages and now finding points of contacts for departments to facilitate moving into Phase III.

I also submitted my HTML training and received feedback so I will take care of that when time allows and move on to other Web Dev trainings.