STA Blog

Week XXXV

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Week XXXV

Scheduling has been weird but finals are done – sorry about the inconsistency!

I’ve noticed that mentally organizing these and going through my old basecamp posts to collect the screenshots and remember everything I’ve done takes much longer than actually writing them. Perhaps I should start saving bullet point notes and screenshots into a folder as I go through projects to make blog updates more streamlined.

CoLA Web Refresh

This last stretch was a lot of smaller sites. I felt really smart organizing my unit notes spreadsheet into alternating colors blocks for each department, until I realized just today that someone had made tabs for the different departments at the bottom. Isn’t the human brain amazing!

As much of a pain as it was for me to update 20+ years of newsletter archives for some dusty old sites, I’m glad they’re accessible; someday I’d like to go through and read them just for curiosity’s sake.

Japan Lab

With a few variations in color and file format, these are the final logos.

Nice and simple, even though my pixel fujisama was sadly unused, this was a fun project and it’s the first time seeing a logo I designed on a website.

Texas German Dialect Project

Project: Retractable Banner for “The TGDP Process”
Client /Prof: TGDP (Margaret Blevins & Hans Boas)
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Maddy K
STA team members: N/A
description/plans: Texas German Dialect Project has been working with us since 2019 to develop a series of banners. All together the banners will act as an interactive “museum” one can walk through & learn about TGDP’s research. This will be the second banner in the series! Our goal is to be making about 1 banner per month throughout the summer.
To be completed: June

So this is my first time using InDesign in a while. It’s also the largest file size in inches (6.5 feet) I’ve ever worked with. As much as I’ve complained about vectors I can definitely see the importance here (flushed emoji).

A lot of the brainpower here went into trying to determine the number of horizontal guides for 10 text boxes, 3 of which were roughly twice as long as the others, so I guess that would suggest 13 rows, but that’s not accounting for space at the top and bottom, nor the image spacing.

My very rough first draft right now has 3 columns and 36 rows (I know), but I might play more with spacing.

Maybe getting more comfortable with InDesign can be my summer goal, since outside of work I’d like to do more writing/publication creative stuff anyways.

HIS 315K The United States, 1492-1865

Just a quick faculty update to some older course graphics – props to some departed STAs I didn’t get to meet for this nice color scheme!

COLA Commencement Video Assets

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COLA Commencement Video Assets

 

Between my UTFC assignments, Valerie assigned me a smaller task which is to create assets for the live streaming COLA graduation. I went ahead and worked on creating different variations of colors, backgrounds, 2022 commencement logos, and formal logos.  My favorite ones are the lower thirds with slight transparency but I prefer the logos on the full opacity images. I also enjoy the orange over the blue because it feels more vibrant and less unsaturated and dull. Currently, I am awaiting feedback on these.

 

Week 7 Summary

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This week has been really exciting for me since I spend most of my time working on my website project for professor Monfils. I added the contents to each page of the website. I will keep working on the website and hopefully will have it ready to be use.

A Farewell

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Hello all,

I can’t believe I’m writing this post! It’s been almost 2 years since I started but it feels like I’ve worked here forever and yet it feels particularly strange to be leaving so soon.

 

When I first started, I was recovering from a semester where I had to quit my internship and drop all my classes due to a personal crisis. I was excited and surprised to receive an offer from LAITS after a Zoom interview w/ Suloni and Valerie from my parents’  poorly lit office.

 

Fast forward 2 years, and I feel like I’ve grown so much, in my hard skillset as well as confidence in myself and what I can bring to a team. I’ve had the chance to work on such a wide variety of projects alongside other wonderful STAs and full-timers and learned so much along the way. I’ve also figured out what I want to do with my life, and will be transitioning into the accessibility UX field soon.

 

Thank you to Suloni for being the best manager I could ever hope for, Valerie for constantly being a supportive & kind supervisor, and Maddy for the pączki recommendation (dziękuję bardzo! Napewno bedziemy przysłym tygodniu tam pojechać). Thank you also to the lovely STAs past & present, you all have genuinely been such fun, friendly people to work with and I hope we can all stay in touch.

 

As for my post-LAITS and post-graduation life, at the end of this month I will be starting at GBH (part of PBS and NPR)’s National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) — a lot of acronyms, I know – as an Accessibility Analyst for their consulting group. It’s a largely remote position, but I will be moving to Boston, their headquarters, in a couple weeks. I’m beyond excited for this next chapter of my life holds, but I’m also very sad that this means that this chapter is coming to a close. I can credit the STA program with so much of my professional and personal development over the past 2 years, and that means more than I can ever possibly put into words.

 

Lingco Banners

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Lingco Banners

 

Here are all the banners I have made this week for UTFC. All of these have been approved or need final improvements. There are a handful left that are still in the drafting phases but hopefully it will be finished by next week.