STA Blog

A change in direction

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A Change in Direction

Since the last meeting, I have been working more on Latinxpop Lab in Figma and troubleshooting Canvas quiz settings for OCILL. On Thursday of last week, it was also announced that the Blanton migration project would be on short pause (just for a week) as larger issues get resolved.

 

 

Learning the Principles and Elements of Design

This KB training (Learning the Principles and Elements of Design) has helped me be more mindful & intentional with my work. Here at LAITS, I often catch myself forgetting that digital is artwork. Even when I am not working on straightforward graphics or illustrations, the projects that I touch all need good design.

Week 4

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

 

Hello, everyone. This past week I’ve just been migrating actual content over from the old CMS to the new CMS. I’ve done my best to maintain a lot of the same structure,  but sometimes it doesn’t translate as well or the original structure wasn’t the best to begin with. I’ve dropped down a few of the pages that I’ve migrated below.

Some of them are identical to the original page while the structures of others are the different.

I have also started the HTML and CSS basic training and it’s pretty interesting. I’ve always wanted get more experience with HTML/CSS/Javascript so the training is a great way to do that and build a foundation. Here is my progress so far:

 

Overall, I’m excited to continue doing this training as well as more content migration tasks.

 

Machine Learning

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Machine Learning Icon

This week I have mainly been working on the completion of the Machine Learning Icon. This design went through many iterations, but we finally come to a design.

When researching a potential design, I wanted to create something the incorporated the brain for learning and something with wires for the machine part.

These were my first two designs:

We decided to go in the direction of the brain that was split with the nodes inside. The main edits were to get the brain to have more of an oblong shape and to find a different way to incorporate the magnify glass.

 

This was the direction we decided to move towards. But we wanted to change the white circle with an opacity of 50% and to make the nodes inside a cutout to match the background of the image.

 

This was the final draft:

 

Design Fundamentals: Branding Systems

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Design Fundamentals: Branding Systems

 

Athena originally spearheaded the creation of this KB. I did a review of the training and provided feedback however she has graduated and is now a full-time employee out in the world! To go over what heavy edits I did: I replaced the banner that was in there to one that was a bit more design-y and graphic book design-y to reflect the idea of the training. I cut out a lot of the written reflection parts and focused more on how to build out a brand system. I did leave in one important reflection and review of a brand she has in there because it was essential to getting a basic understanding before an STA does it themselves. I just didn’t think it was good use of time to do a lot of typing and reviewing and better for the STAs to jump in and start actively trying it themselves.

 

With that being said I did major editing to the activity itself. I made more clear what the brandbooks each need to include and what to build out. There are two different briefs to choose from. I also added my own example as the first STA example for this training so that our trainees can see what one of these prompts actually ended up looking like. Maddy looked over the edits and approved it so it is now ready for the STAs to start going through!