Hebrew Flash Conversion Update

I’ve now got access to a list of extracted flash interactives for the Hebrew site. This removes and human error that would come from manually scraping the page. It turns out there are around 100 flash interactives. However, most of these are multi-paged, and that isn’t something that Canvasser can natively handle (pages must be stacked manually by the user). It’s with this in mind and the complexness/repetitiveness of certain interactives that I’ve decided to take a deep look at all interactives and decide how they should be created.

I’m keeping a few things in mind:

• Which creation tool the interactive’s format most closely matches (The two other creation methods are Quia flashcards and Quia multiple choice)
  • If it is to be created in Quia, is there a loss of cohesion, style, or formatting?
• Difficulty to create in Canvasser
• Potential to split an interactive between parts

It ends up being that many modules could be created in Quia (thanks to talks with Kevin), and it stands to be said whether using these tools instead will hinder the original goal of the interactive. This is why Canvasser is the best option disregarding creation, because it can replicate the interactive almost completely. However, they can become fairly difficult to create as each page complicates and the number of pages increases.

Institute for Historical Studies Suffrage Poster

I was tasked with creating a poster for the Institute for Historical Studies, who are hosting a talk to commemorate 100 years since the 19th amendment.

There were a few challenges:

1. Lots of text of different types was to be included.
2. The tone of the talks were not positive.
   1. However, I want to portray the talks as critical of the past, but not intensely anti-American.
   2. A critical tone is hard to portray within a poster, especially given an image of the side the talks support (not the opposition one is being critical about).

My first draft, in an effort to make the different varieties of text easy to distinguish and read, used gradient blocks. However, this ended up actually being confusing to read, and it wasn’t very visually appealing.

The hours I spent with the text, though, rearranging it in different ways, eventually enlightened me to the point where I could see a simple way to organize the text which was still unique. In the end, I was able to insert many elements of design that I enjoy using in my own work: blocky highlighting, faint patterns in the background, and distorted text. The distorted text in particular was actually suffrage posters’ text extracted from photos. The distortion offers a darker, historical tone, which luckily came from the poster creators themselves rather than my own editing (which is a false visual narrative). I really like the end result. Special thanks to Jaclyn for helping touch up elements of the design, such as creating larger negative space to frame the text, and decreasing the size of the colored pattern to remove unwanted attention.

Hello,

In the past week, I’ve been working on Cascade help requests as well as some Canvasser modules. For the Cascade help requests, there’s a Sanskrit Gallery page that was transferred from an older platform onto Cascade. Through this process, the image descriptions became hidden from the user unless they hovered over the image with their cursor for a few seconds. The client wanted to add the description onto the image so that it’s easily visible. I went through and parsed out the descriptions (which contained HTML tags) and formatted it so that it’s easily readable. Here they are:

Also, I spent some time working on a Canvasser module (Lab 9 Section 6) which was missing popups for every data point on the graph.

For every point on the data table, I had to create an ‘overlay’ photo, as well as a popup window with the correct information from the original vLabs module. Frankly this was a little bit of a tedious process, but it was a nice change of pace to work in Photoshop for a bit!

Life and Letters: INHALE. EXHALE. ANALYZE.

I had the opportunity to work on another illustration for the Life and Letters magazine. Below are parts of my process for how I came up with the illustration and the end product. Many images for inspiration and reference for color palettes come from the NY Times Opinion art on Instagram that I follow. The exception is the image on the right in the first row which is done by the artist Molly Mendoza. My idea for the composition was based around the mountains and objects floating in space that represent types of media to get news. The person directing me wanted the imagery to focus primarily on text and newsprint so I implemented typography and news spreads in the floating shapes.

Here are some of the first sketches I came up with for how the message of the article can best be conveyed. Two of the sketches are very different from the idea of mountains and floating objects as they were some of the first brainstorms. The rest of the sketches are refinements of the compositional layout for the idea we agreed upon. Some ideas that were brought up to consider was what the person would be doing on the side of the mountain. We did not want imagery of a person hiking or be obviously meditating in the landscape. The image should be of someone who is contemplating and analyzing in a meditative manner.

Here is the two color palettes I created for the client so they could decide what they wanted the overall look of the image to be. They decided upon the top one with more blue-green ranges and fewer pinks and yellows. The hope was using cool colors well help convey an overall mood of calmness compared to warmer colors of the second palette. From these options I would adjust the values of these colors to get more range in the illustration.

I am very pleased with the final product and I think the people who asked me to work on it were very happy with how it turned out. It is now published on the site and is displayed as the first image on the homepage, and the image after is my work from the Stress Tips article as well. Having the opportunity to work on illustrations that allow me to be more involved in the creative process as well as getting my work published is something that I find most rewarding about working here in the office. Hopefully in the future I can keep working on building a portfolio here through these projects.

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STA Banner

I was tasked with creating the banner that will display all STAs for this Fall’s program. It was definitely a task to figure out how to display a bunch of photos in an interesting way, without drawing the eye away or making viewing confusing. I went through quite a few iterations, and much thanks to Jac for adding in the photos and making some text a little more readable. I think my first draft was pretty gross but the end result was really nice. It’s interesting to see an idea advance after breaks between working. Overall I enjoyed the project a lot, I tried a different style than what I am usually making and the design requirements were fairly open to play with.