finished migrating content for TIES Lab, minus contact info, social media, and the People page

The site is now live: Home | TIES Lab (utexas.edu).

I also worked on the VirtualMeeting App this week.

Fixed Issue #3: making the status block the same size as the video

Fixed issue #4: ability to create custom waiting message

 

the default waiting message is

I added a filed on the edit page to add custom html for the waiting message, and a column in the meeting database table to store the custom message

Week XXXII

I think these numberings are turning into a fencepost problem since I’m writing midweek anyways, but I want to stick with the roman numerals.

Japan Lab

Project: Japan Lab logo design
Client /Prof: Adam Clulow
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Suloni Robertson
STA team members: N/A
description/plans: Refine existing logos for the Japan Lab site
To be completed: Mon, Apr 25

This project has a hard cap of 15 hours, so it’s been an exercise in workflow and client communication to get everything done efficiently. The gist is to refine a logo for Japan Lab, a UT project for developing computer games based on Japanese history. It’s gone in a lot of different directions so far.

I started by, at Suloni’s suggestion, choosing the 3 frontrunners from a long design document of logo drafts, and incorporating a vectorized Godzilla shape the client was hoping to see, as well as mocking up how they look in the site.

 

 

The client then expressed interest in my own ideas, so with time constraints in mind, I drafted a simplified vector.

(I say simplified, but I just want to show off how stupidly complex I made this vector, because I don’t know how to draw just the white outline)

The client then reminded me that the project is computer game-related, which I hadn’t thought about because I didn’t really read the site, so I drafted a pixelated fujiyama. This one was my personal favorite design so far.

As of writing, we’ve left off with ~30 variants for the client to choose from (with multiple fonts and new graphics such as a pixelated Japan shape) so I am waiting for those to be narrowed down.

Advanced Training: Create Pixel Art in Illustrator

Suloni suggested this because of the above project. It’s straightforward enough, so of course I had to make it more complicated for myself and choose a difficult image, an animation still from Castle of Cagliostro.

The shapes were difficult to get right, but I was happy with how the colors and overall composition came out.

Out of sheer curiosity, I tried simply shrinking the image and indexing the same number of colors, to see how my work compared to the computer’s, and then overlaid them in a GIF.

The computer’s was definitely bumpier, albeit more accurate shapewise. I’ve done a lot of pixel art, but often by shrinking the reference first and then cleaning up the shape. This training was very useful for learning an entirely different approach that I ended up using for one of the logos not long after. Thanks Suloni!

CoLA Refresh

We’ve been cleaning up a lot of auto-migrated sites both small and large, and while it’s too much to summarize everything, I want to show one example of the type of philosophical issue I run into.

On a long page like this, with anchor links at the top (a feature not supported in Pages) our rule of thumb is to translate the sections into accordions or tabs. Makes sense, right? Shortens the page, makes it more navigable at a glance. Well…

It seems as if each of these categories had several subcategories. Ranging from 1 or 2,

To… however many this is.

So an accordion would look like: 2 sentences, 2 sentences, 1 sentence, 2 sentences, several pages of info, 2 sentences.

And then you get into the question of, what are these categories anyways? What is the hierarchy supposed to be here? Is Specific Interests/Requirements noteworthy enough to deserve its own formatting separate from every other section of the page? How much does consistency matter?

Cascade layouts do not make it easy. For now, I’ve been noting a lot of these long pages and leaving them on the back burner.

Immigration & European Soccer Course Promo

Project: Immigration & European Soccer Course Promo
Client: Dr. Hans C. Boas
Completion Status: Done! (And in about 4 days, I’m impressed)
Staff Guidance: Suloni Robertson
STA Team Members: Cristina (it me)
Description/Plans: To design and art-direct the promo material material for the GSD course on Immigration & European Soccer.

 

Client Direction:

Pick one of the following taglines, and add the call to action “Learn more about European soccer and immigration in GSD s310 IMMIGRATION AND EURO SOCCER this summer!”

 

– “For Immigrants, Soccer Is often more than a Sport”
– “Diversity at Play: Immigration and France’s Soccer Team”
– “What a Soccer Scandal Says About Dog-Whistle Politics”
– “Germany Wants to Unite People Hosting Soccer’s Euro 2024”

 

They also gave me the following images as inspiration and possibly to work with as well, but I didn’t see any of those as a potential good fit.

 

So I decided to look for images on my own that were for sure free to use, and I found this picture of some soccer shoes resting over a ball, in the middle of a field, which I thought showed great potential. Then I revisited the client’s potential taglines and noticed that they were not focused on a specific country. Some mentioned Germany, some France, and one mentioned the 2024 UEFA European Football Championship. SoI decided that representing a single country wasn’t enough, and decided to look for an image that represented European culture as a whole, and I stumbled upon the European Union flag. From there, an idea was born… (This was my original quick draft to propose the general idea).

 

I went through a few different iterations trying to edit the ball properly. First, I masking the shape of the ball was a challenge because of the pattern in the original image and the shading. I was able to remove the color, but with it, the texture and lines of the ball were messed up. So I looked for a different copyright-free image that was the closest thing to a monochromatic ball I could find, and used that to mimic the texture and shading of the ball. Then I had to fix the color of the overlayed image of the EU flag. Next, when I tried to translate this idea into the printed promo formats, the hues of the ball came off way duller than in the original. Turns out, that blue is one of the hardest colors to translate from RGB and CMYK. The more you know! 🌈⭐️ Anyhow, I compromised and remade the design fully on CYMK, since most of the deliverables required that color scheme anyway. Long story short, here’s how everything turned out!

 

Shirt update

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2022/04/20/44680-2/