Hello LAITS,

Today is my last day as an STA, it has been quite a long journey. I still remember being interviewed by Valerie and Suloni in that conference room when I was on the verge of giving up my passion for design, but here I am now with 2 more years of design experience and successfully transitioned into tech. Literally a win-win.

I truly appreciate the guidance and support I received these 2 years from our team, these people are so freaking smart and kind it’s CRAZY!! I really hope this program lives on forever so future STAs and experience this blast. A big shoutout to the OGs – Abriella, Thuy, Maddy, and Valerie, you guys have been here since the very first day I can remember, hearing your stories and accomplishments really warms my heart. It has truly been a pleasure working with such a talented and genuine team, and I wish you all best luck for your future.

Some updates on my future plans, I will be joining a startup in New York called Lunchbox this summer and start grad school at Carnegie Mellon University during the fall. Please stay in touch, I will miss you all.

Week of 5/2/22

It’s already May – insane. I’ll be officially done with my classes on Friday, and am graduating on the 20th. I’m going to take a week off next week to recuperate from the semester, and then beginning working my summer hours (20 hours a week.) I’ll be working here in the summer until July 29th. After that, I am going to move to Orlando to begin grad school.

This week has mostly involved a lot of new project prep as well as working on trainings. I am going to begin working on the STA Movie Poster assignment, where I will photoshop a poster to look like Interstellar’s poster.

Iconography Training

On Monday I completed the first drafts of the iconography training. They currently look like this:

Abriella has given me some really good feedback on these, so I will update my blog when I make more changes. Namely, I need to have more consistent detail line weight, and also center the “network” one more.

COLA Turtle Animation

On Friday, I had some technical issues with After Effects which I had to troubleshoot with Tate. Fortunately, I was able to figure out what the issue was, so hopefully it will not happen again. Additionally, I began more designs for the turtle characters. I intend to do a set of three for this next one, and have created the illustrator graphics for two of them.

For this one, I wanted to show an older character to convey that college is for everyone and you don’t have to be young to get a degree!

I gave this guy a handsome full beard and mustache. I think he looks quite distinguished (how turtles grow beards – or hair at all really, baffles me.)

I haven’t had the chance to make the vectors for the last one, but here is the sketch:

I thought including a ponytail would add some diversity to the hair styles used, and also will include a band-aid as a fun accessory. I feel she is quirky, and very much unlike the other turtles.

I am really enjoying designing these turtles and working on this animation project! I am very excited to see how the COLA graduation website will turn out once it is finalized. 🙂

More updates will come later in the week/early next week!

Turtles for Tate’s animation

These turtle will be animated for COLA graduation’s livestream

This week I did backup testing for UTinContext and the Blanton. I tested the functionality of backup plugin for Ruben.

 

VirtualMeeting app with Chris Pittman

I also worked on adding a feature to auto start a stream at a designated time

Week XXXIII

Japan Lab

We’ve narrowed down the font and logo, so I’m playing with colors and arrangements this week.

The round logo was harder than I thought it would be… Illustrator’s “text on path” tool is not very friendly. I am waiting to hear back if the lowercase subtitle seems too casual.

Course graphics: Masterworks of American Literature

This week I made the set of buttons for this course. I am also experimenting with a new method of summarizing a lot of little course graphics files: finder screenshots. What do we think, too lazy? Should I get back to doing design menus again?

Course graphics: Global Governance

Just updated the buttons and banner for this one, as well as making a new stinger animation. You can see I’ve sneakily started exporting everything as pngs.

CoLA Web Refresh

At long last, I finished the Asian Studies and related sites. The South Asian institute was much bigger than expected – part of this was a log of conferences going back to 2006. But updating the Sanskrit pages did inspire me to check out John Keay’s India – A History since I am too lazy to find a translation of the Vedas or anything.