Housekeeping: Elements and Principles of Design training

Some more housekeeping, as the CoLA Refresh project slowly picks up steam: I just completed the Principles and Elements of Design training, which involves demonstrating different design aspects using art as examples. I also created sketches outlining each feature. I won’t show you all of them, since there are close to 30, but here are two slides.

Some of the elements I found kind of subjective and hard to identify (like the difference between size and proportion, or balance and unity) but I had fun making the sketches. I particularly hope my American Gothic interpretation ends up in a stick figure museum one day.

EDIT:
Got some feedback, and I revisited a few slides with more contemporary design examples, which was, honestly, much easier conceptually. We may end up clarifying in the KB post, but I wasn’t actually supposed to do classical art for all of them. Here is the “size” slide:

Hi everyone! This was what I worked on for the past week:

Project: Blanton Website Migration
Client /Prof: Blanton Museum
completion status: started work on August 23 and still continuing
staff guidance: Ruben Garza
STA team members: Marianne, Angie
description/plans: Work on migrating the current Blanton museum website pages to the WordPress site

I continued working on the Blanton project with my main focus being on the exhibition pages. I copied over content from the Blanton’s past exhibition pages, it was fairly simple because they all had the same layout for the most part.

Here is an example of one of the exhibitions:

I learned how to add more complicated blocks like 360 virtual tours.

And to do this I got more familiar with the inspect tool and iFrames.

Again, it was a lot of copying and pasting.

I also attended a meeting on Thursday with Ruben, Suloni, Estella, Marianne, and Angie discussing the project and next steps, and while I really appreciate the opportunity to be working on this project and am thankful to be apart of the team, I am also excited to take a little break this week and switch my focus to a new project for a Professor and learn more about Grav (which Estella is kindly giving me a tutorial on today).

This week I continued to work on the Blanton Exhibition pages with Asmita.

We have many more pages to work through.

Had a meeting with Ruben and got a little context into why the project is happening.

The wordpress version the website is using right now has some security vulnerabilities, and some people on the internet want to take advantage of those vulnerabilities.

How to Create Annotated Mock-Ups KB

Project: Write-up for a new KB
Client: Design & WebDev STA team
Completion Status: Done and published
Staff Guidance: Suloni
STA Team Members: Cristina (t’is I)
Description/Plans: Write a new guide for STAs to reference if working on annotated mock-ups.

I don’t think I had to do that kind of intro for this sort of project… but I haven’t done any of those for my current projects, so I thought I’d give it a go, for practice. Anyway, since I’ve described the premise of this project already, let me tell you why I was assigned to it and how I went about drafting it.

First, I was assigned to this task based on an annotated mock-up I made recently. (You can find it below, on the most recent update on the Texas Beyond History project). So, the steps to go about making something like this were pretty fresh in my mind.

Moving on, I drafted this KB by dividing it into 3 sections: an introduction, a brief list of goals, and the steps to make an annotated mock-up in context. For section 1, I explained why we make stuff like this as STAs, then I defined what mock-ups are in general, and concluded by pointing out why an annotated mock-up is different and important. On section 2, I just listed three goals of the guide, which are to understand the definition, the theoretical & practical applications of these, and how to compliment these with clear client emails. For section 3, I proposed a situation (which is pretty much the same situation I was in when I made the mock-up that started this all), and explained step-by-step how to carry out this task.

Finally, I added two links on trainings for further email and client communication tips, and I made the banner here below for the KB. 

Update: “Here’s the link to the published page: https://sites.la.utexas.edu/kb/2021/09/20/how-to-create-annotated-mock-ups/ Enjoy!” – Cristina (me), September 20th, 2021

Photo IDs

Here are some Photo ID’s I worked on this week…

That’s it… don’t have much to explain; did some color correction work, and contrast adjustments. I think by this point y’all know how these are made…