STA Blog

Week 1 – Isa

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🫐 First week back! 🫐

Transitioning Back

Summer break was really fun! I spent a majority with my family, it was super nice to be able to spend time with them. We watched the World Cup together, it was really memorable this year.

Now that I’m back, I’ve been getting used to walking around on campus again and working out my schedule with my job. As everyone is settling into their classes and deciding whether to add/drop, my work as a Design STA has been very manageable!

All week I have been working on the STA cutouts. All it involves in cutting out the background of each photo of the STAs’ and cleaning it up. Photoshop has been the platform I’ve used for it and it’s very simple work!

Usually the flow for me in doing this project is:

  • Identify the student I’m going to mask the background of
  • Open one file in Photoshop
  • Drag the rest of the files of that same student into the same Photoshop file
  • Use the object selection tool to select the subject
  • Apply a layer mask
  • Clean up anything the selection tool missed
  • Repeat until all photos are properly masked
  • Export all layers into separate PNGs
  • Place the files into the right folder

It’s pretty simple once you finish the first STA! It’s a lot of files, but I do have ample time to get it done. Getting back into properly naming files is a good habit I need to keep building, too.

Overall, my first week back has been really good!

First Week of the Fall Semester

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My first week of the 2026 fall semester has been a blast. I started off the week by attending one of my shifts here and continued work on the voting PSAs. We are just about finished with them right now, but I will go more into detail regarding the videos later on in this blog post.

I’m taking 4 classes this semester and I’m very excited to learn a lot of new material and skills. I will be taking 3D modeling and texturing, games and interactivity, solo studio, and 2D animation for games. I hope to take what I learn in these classes and translate them into my work as an STA.

This week was filled with making the final edits to the voting PSAs. There are a total of 8 videos, all with varying audios and slight variations to animations. Being able to reuse animations and assets has helped reduce the work load immensely, allowing me to complete tasks much more efficiently.

Register to Vote

Election Day

Early Voting

It’s far too early to start advertising these PSAs, however I’m happy to have them near finished. If there are any changes or edits needed, they will be simple and quick to adjust.

Last Week of Summer

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We’re on our last week of summer and I’m excited to continue working as a design STA for the 2026 fall semester. This week has been a busy week for me. I’ve been working on 2 big projects that I have mentioned before in past blogs as well as a few small assignments. It’s a lot of work, but I’m happy to have something to keep me busy.

First, I’ll show the final results for the Collab Lab computer backgrounds. My art director had some feedback with the design and requested I make another one for the audio team with a separate and unique background. I really liked the artist that created the first one, so I went back to Adobe Stock to find more of their work. I landed on a red and blue design with similar patterns and movement to the first one. Credits to 3DJustincase on Adobe Stock for these beautiful works.

I enjoyed this small assignment, mostly because it was simple and was a good way to take a break from more challenging projects.

A few days ago, I received the audio files for the voting PSAs. With the audios, I was able to start working on timing and finalizing the animations. I’ve been putting most of my focus on transitions since the assets are mostly simple and minimalistic. I’m happy to say that I’m starting to find my work flow and have slowly started to improve in my efficiency since starting this.

So far, I only have a few of the animations partially complete. I’ve sent the below version to my art director and am currently waiting on feedback. While I wait, I’m working on finishing up the main movements of the animations for the other versions.

As the summer comes to an end, I will begin preparing for the fall semester. I’m extremely excited to see what new experiences this school year will bring.

My First Project

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My First Project

ARH 301 Introduction to Visual Arts

I was assigned this project right when I was finished with my trainings and I’m so glad to have been chosen to work on this animated intro! I attended my first meeting to understand what the TAs and Professor Cushing wanted for the new animated intro. In this meeting we discussed the professors interests and what he might want to be included, but overall I was given full freedom to edit whatever I wanted based on a couple of requirements and Cushing’s interests. I had to do a 30 seconds visual arts intro in homage to the classic Masterclass Theater and with a bit of goofiness, but also have a scholarly vibe.


Given so much freedom, I was thinking of a variety of intros I could do. I eventually came up with 3 options that seemed fitting and I thought to bring it to Lila to help me ideate and finalize an idea. She liked the sound of 2 of the 3 options, so she suggested I storyboard the ideas and make some rough animations on After Effects so that she could understand the options better.

For both of the ideas, I wanted to frame the pieces Cushing goes over in the course in those intricate museum worthy golden frames, so I found a couple on Adobe Stock and began animating the first idea after downloading a good amount of the course pieces. The first Idea was basically just a spotlight revealing “ARH 301” and a zoom out to reveal the full course name + the professor on cover of an old looking brown book cover. In the “ARH 301” letters, I was going to place the course pieces in them moving in a carousel to give more movement to the intro overall. This intro would’ve accomplished being scholarly and the Masterclass Theater theme after I added some details. However I showed Lila and we were both a bit hesitant to more further with this idea before seeing what the second idea was. (The repetitive motion of going up and down the letter really threw us off..)

For the second idea, I wanted to emphasize the art pieces that the course will cover, so I did a gallery walk but with a small twist to give it the wacky Cushing desires. The art room’s wall is brown with wood floors giving a more traditional vibe. Most pieces are framed in the elegant gold frames with a couple more modern pieces in just a black frame with a white background behind the pieces. We start by “walking” into the room and seeing all 3 walls (left, middle, and right) filled with pieces with a statue in the middle of the room. I thought to put Michelangelo’s David statue in the middle as it’s a well-known work of art and is a great center piece. The camera then pans to the right wall, making its way from one piece to the next on the wall and continuing to middle then left wall. After seeing all of the pieces, the camera pans back to the middle and we see that statue once again, but this time, the statue has eyes and gives the audience a wink before zooming right passed the shoulder going into the “next room” symbolized through an arch. The wackiness in this isn’t just the statue having eyes, I made sure to use Professor Cushing’s eyes from a photo I found of him.

I posted the WIP video to basecamp looking for any feedback I could get and one of the PM/PA, Sam, loved what I had going so far! There was just one suggestion she shared: Could I change the David statue to another statue covered in the course due to the nude nature of the statue. This was not an issue to me at all, so pivoting to a different statue covered in the course was no problem at all! The statue went from David to Berlin Kore.

Of course, we landed on doing the gallery walk idea since this idea was able to hit every requirement and wants! Scholarly, in homage tho Masterclass Theater, clever, and wacky! The ideating, drafting, feedback, and revising loop was prevalent in the project, but I enjoyed hearing the critiques and feedbacks as I continued with the project. Having a fresh pair of eyes looking at the animation was much needed as everything just looked the same to me as a certain point!


Overall, this project being my first project just made me feel extremely excited for what else is to come in the future regarding STA projects, skills I’ll learn, and sense of confidence in the skills I have currently. ( ˶ˆ꒳ˆ˵ )

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Quick Recap of My Trainings

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Quick Recap of My Trainings

It’s been about a month since I finished my trainings, and I’ve gotten to work on very fun and amazing projects!
Quickly going over my training works:

A couple of course graphics I did for my chosen course of PR339K Digital Graphics Communication! I had to go through many iterations of the backgrounds before I landed on the ones I did for the monitors. I had to keep switching the background up since the one I first chose was intricate and would be extremely distracting as a background. Thus, pulling the attention away from the course contents and professor. The old iterations are below!

Overall, I learned a lot during this training period and I’m glad the trainings are built to be quite similar to the projects us design STAs work on regularly! Never having touched Adobe InDesign and Illustrator, there was definitely a learning curve, but I came out understanding the basics and wanting to use it way more. There were times I was so confused with what’s going on in the programs, but a couple of searches later, I learned and used the new skill in the training and will apply in the future.

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August Tasks and Projects

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I haven’t posted here in a moment so I thought I’d take this chance to show what I’ve been working on. I had been tasked to create a background design for the collab lab computers, like the ones in the design lab. I was instructed to keep the theme interesting but not too distracting from the lists of tasks listed.

I first developed a simple style with a textured gradient found through Adobe Stock images. I wanted the background to feel uniform, so I adjusted the text bubbles to match the colors. I created 4 different versions to give my director a variety of options.

Design lab computer background
My examples for the collab lab computer background

I was happy with the results, however it wasn’t what we were quiet looking for. The background was too simple and the text bubbles were not contrasting enough. I was tasked into finding a background with more movement and to revert the text bubble colors to black text and white background.

I went back onto Adobe Stock images to find an abstract piece that was more visually interesting. I came upon the one shown below and went ahead and made edits accordingly. I went with just 2 variations this time since I was given specific instructions on what needed adjusting.

My updated versions

I’m much happier with the result of this version. I feel the overall design is much more contrasting and visually appealing. I have not heard from my art director yet, so I’m currently waiting on feedback.

There is one other project I’m working on, however I’m not sure how much of it I can share. What I can say though is I’ve been tasked to create a poster for a certain group of STA students.