STA Blog

Week 4

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This week, I began drafting the graphics for NTR 306. The professors liked my first design direction, so I went from there. I iterated different background colors and photo effects to find something that both looked good and would work in the studio. I tried some green overlays, but ended up going with a warmer overlay.

Here are the latest drafts for the Canvas banner and TA monitor:

I also began training for the French textbook. I worked through making the backdrops and the Lingco banners. After finishing the Lingco banner, I got started on some of the banners that will eventually be used. Here is one of them:

That’s it for this week!

More STA Training

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This week I continued to work on an arrangement of projects. I finished my photo ID training, finished my Studio Course Graphics, and now I’m working on the UT French Course Training module. Although I was a bit lost as I started the Studio Course Graphics training, I was able to decide on a color scheme and personalized background. Here is one of the mockups for the course I chose down below.

I made a photo of the UT Tower into a cubism-style painting since the course covered 20th-century art.

After receiving feedback and approval on the Studio Graphics training I was able to start the UTFC training. Even though I’m still currently working on familiarizing myself with the training, I was still able to refresh my photoshop skills with secret tips and tricks I had forgotten about. Down below is another mockup of what backgrounds could look like in a hypothetical online live course stream.

Apart from all the training this week, here is a personal project I worked on at my other job. I make concert posters from time to time at a concert/restaurant venue in Corpus Christi, Tx. I ended up making a poster for country singer Robert Earl Keen!

Week XLII

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Week XLII

Back from San Antonio! And I’m still waking up at 5-6 on my own after a week of feeding chickens at sunrise…

Texas German Dialect Project

Most of this week was spend on a first draft for poster numero 3.

The main constraints were a high volume of text, and small image sizes. Some of them I expanded in Photoshop using bicubic smoother, but not before experimenting with an old web tool, http://waifu2x.udp.jp/.

Photo IDs

I actually had some big ambitions for this: swamped by the 7 different Basecamp threads, I wanted to organize all the submissions into one giant spreadsheet, with categorical cells for status and other details.

I was proud of how it turned out, but then I was informed photo IDs are not high priority enough to demand such a time commitment this week. Hopefully the spreadsheet can find more use in the future.

Pages Presentation

This is something I struggled the most with this week. The prompt was essentially to prepare a presentation to pitch the significance of Pages to our new STAs. However, I am extremely bad at marketing and PR.

Suloni and I had a long call about the approach, but my outline is still pretty technical and mundane. I might revise it a bit before the final presentation.

Week 3

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This week got started with the last course graphics trainings, the studio course graphics. Last week, I read through the syllabus and made some moodboards. Once I decided on a direction, I went ahead and began designing the assets. It was rather fun to make some of the bigger design decisions and to design something customized for the course. Here is the final design menu for the studio training.

It was also really fun to mock up the graphics into the studio space itself. This is what it would have looked like!

I also started on my first real project, designing the course graphics for NTR 306 Fundamentals of Nutrition. I’ve started making moodboards to show the different directions the graphic identity can take. I’m excited to be working on this project, as I had a great time finishing the course graphics trainings! As a designer, it makes me so happy when my work is used out in the world, so I can’t wait to start on the graphics.

That’s it for this week!

Week 2

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I’ve completed my second week as an STA yay!! Mainly for this week, I started my Intro Training: Style A & B Course Graphics. For the training, I made a Style A and Style B set of graphics for my favorite course I have taken at UT.

I also started a new training module: Custom/Studio Course Graphics. Studio course graphics are unique to each course and professor, so they require more thought than a simple Style A/B course. I made a couple of mood boards in the meantime to get some ideas for the course I chose, ART3800: Twentieth-Century Art.

                           

Week 2

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Week two started a bit later because of July 4, but I was able to jump right into my Basic STA Trainings on Tuesday. I finished out the Photo ID training late last week. This week, I’ve been focusing on Canvas template trainings, starting with the Style A/B templates. Style A was very straightforward, mainly just dropping in photos and changing the text. I had a bit more fun with Style B, changing the background image and the colors. Here are the final design menus for both.

ITL321-styleA-DesignMenu
CS303E-styleB-DesignMenu

I also got a crash course in dealing with After Effects, when I had to edit the stinger animations for the slides. It was quite a lot to take in when I first opened After Effects, but I was able to figure it out thanks to the helpful KB tutorial.

I also started on the Canvas studio course graphics. Here are the moodboards!

That’s all for this week!