STA Blog

Tasks on a Wednesday

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Miscellaneous Tasks

 

Today in the office I had a couple of random tasks I was jumping around and finishing. The first one when I logged on was reformatting the summer 2021 online course graphic to be 1920×1080 and have the test read “LAITS-Supported Online Courses” instead for Marla.

My next task after that was looking over the photo ID submission emails and special exceptions and make edits to the document to polish it up. I went in and only made suggestion edits so that they may be approved line-by-line first. I finished going through everything that was in the document so far.

Lastly, there was an issue with photo ids and where the uploaded photos were going. Someone made a box link submission and we could not find where it was going or who had access. I went in and made sure each accessible folder to everyone on the team had the cut-out images as well and crossed checked all the files to make sure who had theirs uploaded and edited and who didn’t.

Week 6

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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: Continue migrating data from the old CMS to the new CMS
To be completed: TBD (long-term)

 

Hey everyone. Last week has been much of the same as before. I’ve just been migrating pages from the old CMS to the new CMS. A couple interesting things though, is that there are new features in Pages that have been added, such as the ability to have two columns, images with no text, and probably the biggest feature of all, tables. Because they have now added tables to Pages, there are a lot more pages that we can migrate, so this past week I’ve just been working on those. Some of those pages are quite extensive with a lot of content, so it takes some time to check for broken links and add/format everything. All in all, though, not too difficult. Here is an example of one of the large pages that I have migrated.

 

I haven’t gotten to work too much on my other trainings but I’m pretty close to finishing the HTML training. There’s currently a little bug that I have to fix because I added a flip page feature with JavaScript, but after seeing Slack I might have to hold off on it for a little bit because I’m moving to the Blanton project and splitting time between that and COLA, so I’m sure I’ll have my hands full for a while.

 

 

Spooky Month Commenced: AFR and Trainings

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Spooky Month Commenced: AFR and Trainings

It is here! The best month of the year!

AFR Graphics

This past week was somewhat lighter on the AFR graphic assignments. My primary assignment was to turn a 6-circle venn-diagram into something more digestible and aesthetically pleasing. The diagram I got looked like this:

 

The diagram itself is not aligned well and the colors get muddy when they are combined. At first, I wasn’t sure exactly how to mimic this in our style without changing the style of the Venn diagram. When I tried to copy it verbatim with our color style in, it ended up having the same issue.

I tried a few other versions with less variety in colors…

All of these had the same basic issue – the colors still become muddy and hard to see. I tried another version where I manually chose colors and didn’t rely on opacity to create the Venn diagram.

This was getting closer. The primary issue with this is that the size of the overlap is huge, while the text is relatively small and squished to the side. After getting confirmation that I could, in fact, change the style of the diagram altogether, I was able to explore other options that would make the diagram easier to read and have larger text.

 

The one on the left looks cool – like stained glass – but it ended up being too clunky for the art style. The in the middle and right are based on a “flower” style Venn diagram where each piece serves as a petal on the flower and there is an open center area. This ended up being the route to go, and Maddy liked the one on the right the most. The final version had a third layer of overlap:

And voila, a flower in bloom! I was very happy with how this came out, and again want to thank Abriella and Maddy for all their help on this (also thank you Valerie for looking over it too.)

What I learned…

To document a few things I learned from doing this particular graphic:

  • For most art styles, and especially for AFR, having just a few hues and relying on varying shades of these hues looks better than pulling a ton of different colors together.
  • Venn Diagrams do not need to actually be the traditional Venn shape to get the point across – especially if they are trying to combine more than 4 circles together.
  • While changing opacity can be a handy trick to get an in between color, it can sometimes also end up being muddy. When you are changing the tint or shade of a hue to create accent colors, you usually want to move the hue over slightly to be either a bit cooler or warmer. If you don’t do this, the color ends up looking muddy, and a bit like Clip-Art from 2005. Manually selecting the different colors in the graph can avoid this altogether, although it is more work.
  • Avoid lines for this art style. At all costs. (There are times when it may need to be used, but try to prevent this.)

Trainings

After finishing up this graphic, I began to wok on my trainings again. I haven’t had a chance to touch them since I did the AFR Stinger assignment, so this is a good chance for me to catch up. I had done the A-style graphic format in late August/early September. Yesterday, I drafted up much of the B style for my imaginary class. Here are some parts:

…I wish I could actually take this course.

I’ll finish this training up soon and combine it with the A style graphics for my sandbox course. Then, I’ll move onto some other trainings. I’m really excited to work on the ones that require drawing/art/design in them!

Ethics and Fairness Animation

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Ethics and Fairness Logo Animation

Last week, I was mainly working on finalizing the logo design and creating the animation. Through the different iterations of the animation, we ended up altering the final logo design too.

 

For the animation, we wanted to have the scale moving on the top and movement of the nodes at the bottom. Here is the final logo and animation.