STA Blog

March and April Progress

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Whats going on with IPE now?

I am so so so happy to report that as of last week, all the IPE case study animations are now complete!!

This project has been a crazy journey for me. I’ve had such a wonderful time working on it and everyone I’ve worked with for it was super kind and helpful and it’s so satisfying to see the project come together. Because the deadline was approaching, De’sha took on making 2 animations for the project. Here are the ones that I worked on.

I would like to reflect more on how these animations came together as it was a process I was very new to.

Shanda did an amazing job on the Illustrations for this project and was super wonderful to work with. When animating, I realized that there would be a lot of modifications as we were working with old audio that had to be updated. Usually you need official audio before animating but we were able to work with what he had.

Sometimes, animations would take longer than usual solely due to having to illustrate animation segments that made sense visually. There were medical terms I would have to look up in order to accurately display them. Once the first 2 animations were made, I started to get into a groover of getting them out faster as I had an established workflow. There were many times deadlines had to be moved for this project hence why it was my sole priority for this semester. Sometimes I was scared I would miss a deadline, but with the help of the team, everything turned out.

Overall I’m super grateful I got to work on this project and was able to be given a position to communicate with other teams and employees. I feel this project not only made me grow as an animator, but also as a worker and a leader.

STA Presentation!!

I was chosen to present at the 2025 STA presentation!! I’m suer honored that I was chosen and can talk about my work. I was assigned to talk about the IPE project, but with a little twist. Shanda and I will actually be presenting this project together, which I’m pretty sure hasn’t been done since 2020! As of this post, I will be presenting the project in 2 hours and I’m nervous, excited, and looking forward to it. I’ll update how it went in the next post.

Up Next Slide – STA Presentation 2025

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“Up Next” Slide

Project Overview: During the STA Presentation, there is always a slide that shows who will be up next. Use the other presentation graphics as inspiration to create a design for the up-next graphic. We want it to be cohesive with the other assets as the slide will be placed within the presentation PPT.

Powerpoint template:

Other STA Presentation Assets:

First Draft:

Feedback: Brighten colors, change camera graphic to something more realistic

Second Draft:

Feedback: Change font and camera graphic to match previous STA Presentation assets, remove stars and film strips, add drop shadows to the light beams

Final Product:

Thoughts: A lot of my time during March was spent creating my own presentation for the STA Presentation in April, but in the mean time I also got to create this asset for the overall PowerPoint! I enjoyed working in the theme of “movies” and I think the final design is simple yet effective.

Summer Marketing Asset Update

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(3/31 )Leilani and I were made aware of AFR 320C being added to our list of $500 courses which meant we needed to update and reupload a few finalized assets:

  • Website edits
  • COLA email graphic
  • Tuition Guide
  • Animated Pre-roll

I reorganized the animated pre-roll course list segment to fit in AFR 320C, then I moved on to the COLA email graphic. This course title was quite lengthy because it is cross-listed with 3 other courses–PLUS it had 1 core and 3 flags. (AFR 320C/HIS 320T/MAS 320C/RIM 320C Power and Place: Making Texas History)

The Rise and Fall of German in Texas Posters (TGDP)

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The Rise and Fall of German in Texas Posters (TGDP)

I was tasked with continuing to work on the Texas German Dialect Project retractable posters. These posters had already been in the works, and I had to adjust based on client feedback. The client wanted 3 vertical posters with an icon key. Additionally, the client wanted the dates on the timelines to be proportional to the actual time (for example, if the date is labelled “1930-1934”, it should be clearly indicated that the event took place over that span of time).

Here are the posters that I was given to start with:

Changes I had to make:

  • Create icons and develop a visual key
  • Work on making date ranges look like a range on the poster

Creating Icons

This first thing I had to do was develop a visual key. The client wanted icons that represented 5 different types of events: society, immigration, schools, newspapers, and key event. I used Illustrator to draw icons, staying on brand with the colors given to me.

Society
Immigration
Schools
Newspapers
Key Event

Redesigning the Posters

Now that I had icons, I could move on to putting the posters themselves together. The main thing I wanted to focus on was how to show the date range. I settled on added a transparent box behind the event description and using arrows to indicate it’s date range.

After using this technique and adding the icons, the posters ended up looking like this:

Second Drafts

After sending my designs to the client, I got feedback to make sure that the events were proportionally distanced from each other and to add photos + captions to the poster.

Project status: Waiting for feedback

History SZB Posters

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History SZB Posters

I was assigned to help create posters documenting the life of George I. Sanchez for the SZB building. I was given pictures and text, which I was then to format on posters using Adobe InDesign. The process mainly consisted of cleaning up the photos in Photoshop (sometimes converting to grayscale, removing blemishes, and adjusting them so they weren’t skewed), getting all the elements onto the page, and then rearranging them to make sure that the text was not too overwhelming and that the images were big enough.

View the exhibit:

Save the Date

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Save the Date

The theme for STA Presentations this year was movie productions! The presentation poster was themed around “The Peanuts Movie” film poster, so Save the Date was to be similarly themed.

First Drafts

I decided to display the important information on a clapper board to keep with the movie theme. However, after doing that, the background looked really empty, so I added film strips behind it. I used the LAITS logo colors as the accent colors for my design.

Additionally, I came up with a secondary design because I felt that the colors on the clapper board may be unnecessary, and the black letters for the less important information (“Save the Date”, “College of Liberal Arts”) might be too bold. I also switched the order of the colored film strips in the background (and brightened them) to match the order they are in in the LAITS logo.

Lastly, I created an option with a different accent font choice. This is a font that matches the one on “The Peanuts Movie” poster, so I thought we may want to see what that looked like too.

This is an alternate design that I thought could work as well. I was also able to get the STA roles information in using this layout.

For style one, I received feedback to:

  • Add STA photos to the film strips with a color overlay
  • Replace “College of Liberal Arts” with the LAITS logo

For style two, I received feedback to:

  • Try and add more personality, as the black was a little overwhelming, and it wasn’t very dynamic
  • Rework the hierarchy/arrangement so that the date is more prominent
  • Add the LAITS logo

Second Drafts

For the first version, I added the STA cutouts to all the film strip rectangles because it looked a little odd to have some empty, even if they were covered with something in front. I also moved “Save the Date” to the slate because it became hard to read in the top left corner when I added the STA photos.

For the second version, I tried to add some movement by creating a new, curved film strip and tilting the film slate. I also added the date/time/location to the film strip because it was more prominent there and put the STA roles under the slate.

We decided to go with style 1, and I received feedback to:

  • reposition the STA photos so that they weren’t being blocked by the film slate
  • make the LAITS logo grayscale

Third draft

After adjusting the graphic according to the feedback I received, it ended up looking like this:

We then decided that there was too much white space in certain places, so we decided to use the more dynamic photos of STAs that were also used on the presentation poster. After deciding this, the graphic looked like this.

Final Thoughts

Overall, this assignment was a fun way for me to practice both my layout and graphic design skills. I don’t have as much practice with Illustrator, so making graphics for this assignment was a new and fun challenge. I’m also happy that we decided on adding the STAs inside the filmstrips—I think it’s a lot more visually interesting and unique. Here is the final design!