Week XXXV

Scheduling has been weird but finals are done – sorry about the inconsistency!

I’ve noticed that mentally organizing these and going through my old basecamp posts to collect the screenshots and remember everything I’ve done takes much longer than actually writing them. Perhaps I should start saving bullet point notes and screenshots into a folder as I go through projects to make blog updates more streamlined.

CoLA Web Refresh

This last stretch was a lot of smaller sites. I felt really smart organizing my unit notes spreadsheet into alternating colors blocks for each department, until I realized just today that someone had made tabs for the different departments at the bottom. Isn’t the human brain amazing!

As much of a pain as it was for me to update 20+ years of newsletter archives for some dusty old sites, I’m glad they’re accessible; someday I’d like to go through and read them just for curiosity’s sake.

Japan Lab

With a few variations in color and file format, these are the final logos.

Nice and simple, even though my pixel fujisama was sadly unused, this was a fun project and it’s the first time seeing a logo I designed on a website.

Texas German Dialect Project

Project: Retractable Banner for “The TGDP Process”
Client /Prof: TGDP (Margaret Blevins & Hans Boas)
completion status: WIP
staff guidance: Maddy K
STA team members: N/A
description/plans: Texas German Dialect Project has been working with us since 2019 to develop a series of banners. All together the banners will act as an interactive “museum” one can walk through & learn about TGDP’s research. This will be the second banner in the series! Our goal is to be making about 1 banner per month throughout the summer.
To be completed: June

So this is my first time using InDesign in a while. It’s also the largest file size in inches (6.5 feet) I’ve ever worked with. As much as I’ve complained about vectors I can definitely see the importance here (flushed emoji).

A lot of the brainpower here went into trying to determine the number of horizontal guides for 10 text boxes, 3 of which were roughly twice as long as the others, so I guess that would suggest 13 rows, but that’s not accounting for space at the top and bottom, nor the image spacing.

My very rough first draft right now has 3 columns and 36 rows (I know), but I might play more with spacing.

Maybe getting more comfortable with InDesign can be my summer goal, since outside of work I’d like to do more writing/publication creative stuff anyways.

HIS 315K The United States, 1492-1865

Just a quick faculty update to some older course graphics – props to some departed STAs I didn’t get to meet for this nice color scheme!

For this week, I have been working on the header of the website.

Screen Recording 2022-05-13 at 1.38.49 PM

Also, I am creating the content for the client documentation. Hopefully, we will get it done soon.

Reflecting on my first two months as an STA this semester, I’ve had a great semester here. I’ve got to learn so much in my trainings, make friends with the coolest people, and be apart of a really positive working environment! I’ve made a lot of memories from starting with Hoa to having the funniest conversations with Valerie and Abriella. Estella has taught me a lot about the details and thinking that must go behind web development to make it accessible and visually pleasing. I never had prior experience with design, but I have gotten to work on design trainings and learn from my fellow STAs, Suloni, Valerie, etc.

I just finished completing an infographic on optimal card design layouts as my final assignment for the semester.

This is another example of me learning more about incorporating knowledge of design elements into web development, as the way your final products look is just as significant as the backend.

This summer I’m planning on interning as a software developer in New York, so I’m excited to be out of my comfort zone for the next few months. But I’m also looking forward to returning to LAITS in the fall and start working on more projects with Estella for more clients. Even though there have been mishaps along the way, getting familiarized with the job, I think I’ve learned a ton and don’t feel too new and unfamiliar here after these two months!

Thank you for a great time, I look forward to seeing everybody who is returning in the fall!

This week I became familiarized with using Grav in my local directories and learning how to create/design a webpage using Gantry. Earlier this week, I had a few troubles with installing Gantry and then having certain features/files in my trainings not working. However, I think I finally got the hang of it today and understood how to work with Grav well.

This is the Grav website I have now (I’m hoping to finish it by the end of the day, so I’ll post my updated version.)

Although there are some troubles I have with formatting, I am able to play around to solve these problems. I also understand the web development aspect of Grav, where I know in the future, a lot of my web dev. understanding can be used.

Hey, this week was my second week working as an STA and I got to spend majority of my time this week working on my training assignments for web development. I’m really passionate and interested in developing a lot more in the future, so I really enjoyed getting to learn more about the more programming-based aspects of being an STA.

For the first two assignments, I used the inspect element tool on the LAITS website and got familiarized with using git/github to update my code.

 

 

Finally, I created a Google Slides presentation to recap the basics of the network communication behind websites at this link:  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17DDB9X6w8SLe34A-k0s3oAyGvhqJZU5f8600OadVzwc/edit?usp=sharing

One thing I learned about was that HTML, CSS, and Javascript files worked together to compose a component file. Once a server receives a request and approves it, it sends back the component files to the browser to display it to the user. I have worked with the three scripting languages I mentioned above to a limited extent, so I am excited to continue creating bigger things and expanding my knowledge in this field!

In addition, Suloni seemed to enjoy the design for my slides, so today she was kind enough to ask me to help her work on a flyer and screen ad for a COLA course. I’m excited to tap my toes into the design field, since I’ve never done too much of it before.