Project: HIS314K – create a polished migration map

Client /Prof: Dr. Zamora
completion status: Started August 25
staff guidance: Maddy
description/plans: recreate the migratory labor map(attached below) to allow powerpoint animation/interactivity and highlight different pathways.

• First, I converted the map into shapes in illustrator

• Then I started separating different pathways and experimented with different ways to highlight them  
• Next, I will export each pathways and start animating them in powerpoint.
• 

To be completed: tbd…waiting for client meeting

This week: ending the hiatus

I’m back from taking the summer off! It’s great to be back on campus. Here’s what I did this week, although things have been a little slow:

• Updated my old animation intro for Dr. Callmann’s organic chemistry class
• Got a shiny new @austin.utexas.edu email address
• Edited photo IDs
• Made a reformatted PPT title slide for AFR 303

Can’t wait for the semester to kick up!

Hey ya’ll!

My first project as an STA will be to migrate the Blanton Museum website to a new website on wordpress. I started this project on Tuesday August 24. I am working with Asmita on this project under the guidance of Ruben.

The project is going alright. There are a lot of pages to work through though. And sometimes we don’t have the tools to create certain elements.

For example, toggle elements:

old website:

how it’s goin’:

I’m sure there are wordpress plugins that can help to create these elements, but I’m not going to install any random plugins. I’ll just work on the stuff that I can do and leave notes for Ruben on stuff that I can’t.

Adrian’s 1st Week

This week started two days early for me, due to a scheduling miscommunication. In that time I’ve mostly been working on Cascade training, which has taken a bit more than the prescribed 6-8 hours for me. I’m quite proud of my Galilean moon-themed site so far (my first idea was insects, but that was unsurprisingly taken) and as of writing all I have left is the custom buttons and pull quotes. The tables section especially took quite a long time to troubleshoot in HTML, and I’ll admit I deliberated a bit on the theme (I put a few placeholders for the first sections before deciding and going back to update them).

For the sidebar, I wasn’t quite clear on what to do for the button or what “news site” to link it to, so I linked a wooden button to an article on the history of buttons.

The video table in particular took a lot of reformatting. I rewrote the entire html in textedit to test multiple versions and see what was causing the videos to appear outside the table (it was a single missing<dv> tag).

In my first draft, I was going for a marine biology theme and made news posts about a marine worm being chaired as the new dean and cutting pay for all non-worm staff, but I realized the silly theme would be hard to hold together for the whole site. I did, however, make this excellent picture in Photoshop that I hope to use for something else.

I spent a fair amount of time guessing my way around Photoshop with only Gimp as prior experience, and applied an oil painting filter to a cropped Ernest Haeckel engraving of polychaete worms for my backdrop. I made two versions of the overlay text and rectangle: one flat, as featured on my STA test site, and one with a slightly darkened outline, as featured on this blog. The latter I was trying to make a ribbon that would only appear over the lighter portions of the backdrop to enhance the contrast, using the luminosity tool, but I don’t know enough about how layer blending works to get it perfectly right. Another tricky thing was maintaining image quality and learning the “export for web” tool; I had to resize a gif (below) to upload to Cascade.

Original

Resized (with a lot of quality loss :c )

Yesterday, I had a meeting to learn about Pages, and have been assigned some training for the editor which I have yet to start. Hopefully I can start those by the time I’m presenting this! All in all, pretty good first week.

My first week as an STA!

I had two firsts this week: starting my sophomore year of college and joining the Design and Coding STA team! It was an exciting week to say the least. In terms of my STA work, this week I began to work on my first STA trainings on web development basics.

I learned how to use the browser inspect tool and messed around with the UT Rhetoric and Writing webpage. It was really fun to change the stylistic elements and learn more about how to view the HTML/CSS of a website.

I also got to pick apart the accessibility of certain website like one for Channing Tatum’s book “The One and Only Sparkella” through my web dev accessibility standards training. This grew my understanding of how a website layout/style can affect the viewer’s experience and encourage inclusitivity.

I also started work on the Blanton Website Migration project. I worked alongside Ruben, Marianne, and Angie to help with the website refresh through WordPress. This was my first time working with WordPress so I had a lot to learn about the different tools and widgets. I worked on numerous pages and copied over the content such as the #MuseumFromHome page and the Accessibilities and Amenities page.

The use of WordPress for the Blanton project helped me gain more comfortability using the application which also aided me in creating this blog post!