STA Blog

Update 6.14.2021

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LatinX Pop Lab logo

Last week, I was assigned the logo of a professor’s lecture series that covers, analyses, and discusses the Latinx’s cultural impact on the US. The professor specifically called for an alternative graphic that didn’t include the face on the middle of the logo (acting as the O in POP):

Here are some initial versions, which would be edited due to the O being too far apart from either P:

Here is a more finalized version, which has a wider O and a more accurate off-black color chosen in the original Ai file:

Course Graphics for GRC 401C

A professor in the Department of Geography & the Environment requested course graphics with the following notes about the color palette and style guide to be used:

The color palette matches what I could use to differentiate among the subsystems: Atmosphere (yellow), Hydrosphere (light blue or blue), Lithosphere (tan), Biosphere (green).

This class is all about the earth, a Geosystem, comprising the four subsystems above. So the earth from space (the Big Blue Marble), clouds, weather systems, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, mountains, rivers, coastal features, sand dunes, rock formations, lakes, pretty landscapes of any kind (from deserts to tropical forests to glaciers), pollution, climate change, plants, animals, etc.”

The professor requested the following course graphics:

  • Studio Graphics:
    • Digital Wall Monitor, Custom Design
  • PPT Slides:
    • Lecture Segment Title Slide
    • iPad Overlay (faded or color)
  • Canvas Graphics
    • Dashboard graphic
    • Homepage banner
    • All standard Style B buttons

I initially created four different versions using images from Unsplash that would fit the professor’s request:

Studio backdrop:

iPad Overlay:

Dashboard GFX

Homepage Banner:

Style B Buttons:

After some feedback from Poonum, we could agree that the image used as the background for the third version is the most fitting but needs a couple of adjustments for it to not look too glary. Below are three images showing the original, first edited, and corrected versions of the image:

Fun Tuesday Activity

This is the first-ever STA Fun Tuesday activity, making pixel art out of formatted cells in Google Sheets. Go team Mona Lisa 🙂

OCILL

While I don’t have much to show other than notes and communication, the OCILL transfer project is under way as we prepare to transfer lecture content for a professor’s OCILL website to Canvas! I’ll have more updates on this on my next post.

A Recap of Last Week and One Big Life Update

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A Recap of Last Week and One Big Life Update

I did not get to update my blog before the end of my work week (last Thursday), but this worked out well as I have even more updates and things to share! Maddy sent over some very beautiful photos of the summer-A-frames from campus which I wish to dedicate some blog space to show off. I also revisited the IFML project today, in order to make some transparent GIFs for the client- nothing visually new to share regarding those edits as there were primarily changes to file settings.

 

As for last week, I was finally able to work through the training-in-development due to Poonum’s hard work in editing the “Photo Sourcing and Color Grading” KB training. The images that I edited are also going to be below. Last Tuesday we also had a fun team meeting where we made excel pixel art together- Suloni recommended that we share the final results so please appreciate this Mona Lisa recreation by Miguel, De’sha, and me. As for the nonvisual work of last week, I attended two meetings for OCIL (a big project in migrating work to canvas that is coming up) and for profile page photos. Additionally, I have started building the new homepage for the KB website and will be working on banners for that soon.

 

And lastly, it was my birthday yesterday. I’m twenty now and I can already feel the aching in my bones. (JK) Honestly, though it feels like not much has changed, which is probably as it should be, but I am nonetheless excited to be one year wiser. I met up with some old high school friends and had a great time celebrating two decades, and got this cute Korilakkuma bee plush from the Round One claw machines in Grapevine. Cheers to me for two decades 🙂

Summer-A-Frames

Color Grading

Mona Lisa For The New Digital Era

A New Friend

Flat File Site Coding

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The Dell Medical School “Anatomy of a Bill” project is finally underway! Went to meetings for this a couple months ago and I *think* I blogged about it but as a refresher: Two Dell Med students want to create a website and Canvasser interactive that teach medical students (and eventually patients) about the components of a medical bill. I offered to work on the flat file site and it’s uhhhh a little hard! But I am doing the absolute best I can. I’m getting familiar with the basics again, but what I can’t figure out is how to turn an image into a button!! I’ve done it before but now it’s just slipped from my brain. Once I figure that out, I’ll have the logo refresh the site, and I’ll also place the “About Us” link on the top bar in line with the logo.

Updating KBs

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Hi bl∞g this week I’ve been spending a good amount of time just tweaking and fixing KBs and organizing some internal content for LAITS. Let’s catch up.

Textures Training

I began making an advanced version of the textures training! This training’s going to be a little freeform…I’m providing a few examples of how to use and layer filter galleries and then convert their created ‘texture’ into a brush that can be stamped onto images. Here’s an example of a comic book effect I found:

I want to teach STAs how to add a reflection pool image like the one below: It’s a bit of a tricky process, though, so that’s taken me some time to figure out myself…hopefully I’ll make some headway there soon so I can continue writing up the instructions.

 

Typography Training

Ingrid had given me some feedback that the headings were uneven for the typography training, so I went through and standardized those. I’m wondering now if there should be some kind of template for all trainings so that headings all match.

 

Photo Sourcing / Color Grading Training

I finished up the instructions for this training last week, but Angie ran into some issues while she was trying to import the color table into the swatches panel. Initially, we thought this was a PC only issue, and that the color table ACT file was not compatible with the Swatches ACO file requirement. Turns out Angie just needed to select the file extension she was searching for (kind of a dumb PC thing if you ask me…)

That’s all for now!

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This week I worked mostly on the redesign of the Latinx Pop Lab site. I’m basing the design off the Podcasts WP theme used on the Latinxperts podcasts site. After clarifying the assignment with Suloni and Maddy, I began mocking up the site in Figma. I used this plugin Abriella found that imports web pages to Figma, and it works pretty well.

I also recently sent an email to Professor Aldama to clarify whether he wants the repository to contain artists or artistic works.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2021/06/10/39376-2/

Web-Dev: How to Create a Card Layout KB

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Web-Dev: How to Create a Card Layout KB

The Web-Dev project is a large effort with the following two objectives:

1. Create a training package for new STAs joining the Development (Coding) team.

2. Have a streamlined / organized KB section for the STA dev team to use as a resources on projects

 

As a primarily Design STA, I’m not one of the organizers for this project. However, I was tasked to write a tutorial on How to Create a Card Layout on Cascade, based on the Ethics Project Website Request that I full-filled with Thuy, a fellow STA (details on that are mentioned on a previous blog post, if you’d like to check that out).

 

As with any project I’ve worked on here at LAITS as an STA, I was assigned someone to review my work for feedback. That is always a helpful tool. Though, for this specific project I didn’t need much feedback, all in all. I sailed through this project quite easily. However, one challenge I did have to face was when attempting to upload the gif file I was using for the banner. But I asked for help from one of our coordinators, and was able to resolve that issue in less than a work hour.

 

Anyway, here’s the link to the final KB for this project: https://sites.la.utexas.edu/kb/2021/06/04/how-to-create-a-card-layout/

GIF