STA Blog

Carrie is BACK!

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I’m BACK!!

Hi LAITS and STA, long time no see :). I just arrived in Austin yesterday and today I came to LAITS studio to start my first day as design STA in the semester! It’s a 28 hours flight from Shanghai China to Austin but I survived eventually! There are lots of things happened this summer. In short, I got one internship but I quit soon and started my second internship very quickly.

 

Let me tell the story. As I’ve been designing for several years, I’d like to try something different. I applied for AI product intern at Tencent and got in luckily. I spent one month over there and realized…maybe I should still be a designer. After that, I became a creative design intern in Alibaba, working for a department called Taobao Grocery. That’s really a great 2-month experience for me and I learned a lot as a creative designer (instead of graphic designer). At Alibaba, I designed an internal exhibition for the company to know how the warehouse of Taobao with new technology; meanwhile, I updated the logo and brand guideline for a retail store, which has been expanded more than 7000 shops among China . The group in Alibaba, especially my mentor and PM, is so nice to me and taught me how to grow and how to succeed. If I get a chance, I’d like to show you more pictures and stories about my life at Alibaba.

 

I also travelled to Los Angelas and several cities in China for fun during the summer. Now, I’m back to school and begin my senior year as B.F.A Design Major. I’m excited about my capstone project and I’ll definitely invited y’all to my exhibition at the end of school year. I also took two RTF class to fulfill my RTF minor. I hope I can learn more about editing and the media industry via these two courses.

 

All in All, I’m excited to be back as design STA and continue my LAITS journey with y’all! STA allowed to work with a team in a professional environment as well as expanding my design skills with training. I hope I can utilized my skills gained from two summer internship and helped me to manage myself better at LAITS.

Week 1 (Fall 2023)

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Texas German Retractable Banner #8 Quality Update

Client/Prof: Margaret Blevins
Completion Status: Started on August 22
Staff Guidance: De’sha

Re-exported the Texas German Dialect Project (TGDP) Banner #8 to a higher quality for print.

 

NTR 306 Stinger Animation

Client/Prof:  Laura Lashinger, PhD & Heather Leidy, PhD
Completion Status: Started on August 23
Staff Guidance: De’sha

First main project of the year! My goal is to update a stinger of the NTR 306 class that is titled “Things that make you go hmm.” For this project I made a little emoji guy in Illustrator and then imported into After Effects for animating. Still going through edits, but this is what I have so far:

 

Texas German Retractable Banner #9

Client/Prof: Margaret Blevins
Completion Status: Started on August 24
Staff Guidance: De’sha

Started on a new Texas German Dialect Project (TGDP) Banner! This version isn’t spaced properly and has a few other issues, but this is what I have so far:

First Blog Post!

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Hi I’m Lila Mali! I’m an Arts and Entertainment Technologies major and I’m so excited to be working for the LAITS STA team. I started orientation and got my handbook powerpoint and blog banner done so I’m currently working on my STA caricature. I do a lot of illustration so I’ve been having a lot of fun with my portrait. Here’s the progress I have with it so far.

I plan to finish it next week. I look forward to the rest of my training!

 

My First Blog Post

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Baby’s First Blog Post

My first week as a Design STA has been great! I found the experience somewhat similar to what I did over the summer, so I was able to get into a good groove in the first couple of days. Everyone I’ve met has been very welcoming and supportive. Big thanks to De’sha for helping me get up to speed and unlocking the door every time I have to go to the restroom!

So far, I’ve been busy working on administrative tasks, onboarding, orientation, and whatnot. I got some trainings done for UT, learned the ins and outs of some tools we use here, and created a presentation deck to review some things I learned from the STA Handbook. Now I’m hard at work to spruce up this blog with my first two tasks: Creating a banner and drawing my self portrait. I started on both today and I’m looking forward to continuing that next week. Since I get up so early, I don’t see too much of the other STAs, so I’m also excited for our first weekly meeting, where I can meet everyone and see what they’ve all been up to!

Overall, LAITS seems like a great work environment and I’m happy I joined the team. Stay tuned for more updates as I grow and evolve throughout my time here.

Lorena is back in buisness!

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Update to my last post, Lorena is back at LAITS! They just can’t seem to get rid of me! In all seriousness, I’m super excited to be back and to be working with new and old faces on the STA team.

 

Life updates time! This summer I participated in the UTLA program, and while in LA I also had an internship at Arad Productions and MorningStar Entertainment. At Arad Productions I gained experience in film development by doings like script coverage, writing franchise documents (basically breakdowns of intellectual property), and calls to talent agencies. At MorningStar Entertainment I had the opportunity to be a Production Assistant on three different shows, including Mysteries Decoded, Wild West Chronicles, and an unannounced up-and-coming show. There I also transcribed footage for Mysteries Decoded season 3 using Trint, managed the front desk, and responded to phone calls.

 

My position at LAITS has greatly allowed me to adjust to a more professional atmosphere and have better communication and time management skills which I really appreciated going into the summer. Despite these being film-related internships I also used Adobe Photoshop a bit at MorningStar and employed my design eye at Arad to make my franchise documents more visually appealing. All around, I really came to appreciate the hard and soft skills I’ve acquired here at LAITS!

 

This summer I all around had a ton of fun in LA, from being able to explore California to spend time with the amazing people I’ve met there. I’ll add some photos to this post later on!

 

Now back in Austin, I’m going into my senior year as a Radio-Television-Film major! I’m super excited about the future film projects I’ll hopefully be working on this year and a few of my graphic design endeavors I have planned out. I mentioned this in my last post, but I’ve officially applied to be enrolled in my Connecting Experience course for my certificate, so I’m hyped to be getting started on that project if I’m approved! I’m keeping most of my idea under wraps right now, but the project that I want to work on is a political satire game demo that I’m hoping to do some heavy graphic design and writing for.

 

That’s all the updates for now! Hoping for a great semester here at LAITS, excited to be back again!

Week 8/21 – 8/27

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Branding: Logo Design Training

Project: Fintastic Shack logo design
Client(hypothetically): Fintastic Shack
Description/plans:

  • Your client is The Fintastic Shack: a newly founded family-owned seafood restaurant. The family is very friendly, fun, and loves a good pun, so they would love it if you could incorporate some of that humor into your design.

I tried to incorporate a fish or house/shack motif in every logo variation since the family’s restaurant name itself is a play on words.

Carver Wall Label

Project: Carver Wall Label
Client:  Carver Museum
Completion Status: Started August 25, 2023
Staff guidance: De’sha
Description/plans: This label will be used in the Carver Museum. Document solutions will be printed, so we need to ensure it is a print-ready PDF file for the final asset. Add a header and body text that fits the style of the existing exhibit labels and make sure it is legible.

This project was overall pretty simple. We just ran into a minor hiccup with the fonts of the model pdf not processing into Adobe Illustrator, but it was sorted out quickly. I’m not sure if this is the final text for this graphic, but I am told we will receive it soon.

 

Animate Simple Course Graphic

I’ve always wanted to obtain a better understanding of Adobe After Effects because it seemed like a vital tool for professional video editing. Firstly, I created my backgrounds and text assets in Photoshop and imported them into After Effects as separate layers. I gradually compiled images of printmaking tools from the Noun Project and used Illustrator to image trace them (cleaner edges for resizing). I used a lot of experimentation with masks, speed, and transformations to make the course graphic animation come to life. The inspiration for this course graphic came from a printmaking class I took during the Learning Tuscany program this summer. Sadly Enrique has left UT Austin, but I wanted to make something to commemorate the printmaking class. Although the graphic isn’t super polished, I am very proud of completing it and gaining more After Effects knowledge.

 

Creating an 8-bit Animated GIF

While I wait for tasks to start rolling in I decided to complete the Animated GIF training. I don’t use Photoshop very often when drawing, let alone animating so this was a nice change. The process was easy to follow but I’m wondering if I can create more complex GIFs with more practice.

Race Lab Logo

Project: Resilience and Adversity (in) Children’s Ecology Lab Logo
Client: Professor Ibekwe-Okafor
Completion Status: Aug 21, 2023
Staff guidance: Maddy, Valerie
STA team members: Luisa
Description/plans: Create a well-organized style guide for the professor to refer back to during the development of the research website. The style guide should be specific and easy to understand for the client.

 

When I left for summer I handed off the RACE Lab logo assignment, which I believe was passed to Maddy (I hope the new PR position is treating you well!) and then to Luisa (grad school will be awesome!). On my first day back in the office, I was asked to create a style guide for the professor to reference for color palettes and fonts. Valerie asked me to specifically outline when certain font colors should be used, so there would be no confusion about the color switches. It felt nostalgic to revisit this project since I was initially assigned to it last Spring semester by Maddy:’) I’m glad it was completed and I hope to see it uploaded on the website sometime in the near future!

Reflection: I was surprised to hear the RACE Lab logo assignment wasn’t finished yet, but it was the perfect task to transition back into LAITS with. I remember having a lot of fun brainstorming ideas for this logo and receiving feedback from the client and Maddy. It feels almost ironic that I started this assignment last year and now I’ve wrapped it up with the style guide:)