Current Sta

The Joseph C. TenBarge Outstanding STA Award Announcement Graphics

February 6, 2023 By Carrie Wang

The Joseph C. TenBarge Outstanding STA Award Announcement Graphics

Start: Jan 23th 2023

To be Completed: Jan 30th 2023

Client: LAITS

Staff Guidance: Maddy

Description: A brand-new award for outstanding STA excellence-The award was established to commemorate the founding director of LAITS, Joe TenBarge. Joe was hired in 1998 to promote the integration of technology with teaching at the College of Liberal Arts. Over the next 23 years, Joe transformed a fledgling department into a robust and respected service organization. One of Joe’s proudest creations is the LAITS Student Technology Assistant (STA) Program through which LAITS professional staff hire, train, and mentor UT undergraduates.

The announcement graphic should keep minimal, simple and formal. The dark background such as velvet can help express the elegant style with minimal texture. So the first iteration is made on the blue velvet with subtle sparkle golden typography (serif).

However, the use of dark-blue velvet and golden serif make it old-fashion and lack of LAITS features. So we finally decided to find a waved-texture pattern and overlay LAITS color code on the top of it to make it modern and inclusive. The asset can also be used in studio display when remote studio make presentation with the awards.

The new background needs a more clean and bold typography as the waves has created lots of pattern. I finally choose the type family BentonSans, UT font, for this project. BentonSans is rich in different type weight as well as italic and All-cap versions. I combine BentonSans ExtraBold and BentonSan thin to differentiate the award name and award content.

The final version with following changes:

The portrait of Joe looks isolated from the wave but the original gray background bend into the colorful wave with few contrast. So I decided to place UT capital campaign with lighter effect under Hoe’s portrait. I also used pen tool to transit between the text and portrait.
For the text part, the contrast between thin and extrabold is too much so finally go with regular and extrabold. Maddy and I played with 3D effects to create dynamics and made the final layout.

Week 15

February 6, 2023 By Marissa Devivar

Week 15

NTR 306 Instapoll Stinger

Project: NTR 306 Instapoll stinger
Client /Prof: Hockett-Cooper, Leidy
Completion status: January 30, 2023
Staff guidance: Julie Phillips & Maddy
Description/plans: Creating a new Instapoll stinger for NTR 306 that incorporates the color and text associated with the class.

**We had a freeze the rest of the week so not much other work was done:(

STA Poster

February 6, 2023 By Luisa Matzner

Spring 2023 STA Poster

Final Drafts

Project: Spring 2023 STA Poster
Client /Prof: Internal
Completion Status: Started Jan 12
Staff Guidance: Maddy
Description: Final drafts
To be completed: Jan 23

The STA poster is complete! Very special thanks to Carrie for cleaning up the file and making final edits, and thanks to the design STAs for helping me edit the photos on time!

Postcard and Minor PDF

January 30, 2023 By Luisa Matzner

Summer Marketing

February Postcard

Project: Summer Marketing Feb. Postcard Update
Client /Prof: Internal
Completion Status: Started Jan 23
Staff Guidance: Maddy
Description: Postcard for summer courses.
To be completed: Feb. 6

This postcard is an important part of the marketing push for summer courses. I’ve started updating the colors and adding the $500 sticker from previous years.

Summer Marketing

Minors PDF

Project: Summer Marketing Minors PDF
Client /Prof: Internal
Completion Status: Started Jan 23
Staff Guidance: Maddy
Description: PDF file for LAITS website with info on minors.
To be completed: Feb. 6

This project consists of mainly making minor copy edits to the existing PDF, fixing minor typesetting issues, and updating some gradients and color choices.

Week LX

January 30, 2023 By Adrian McKee

Week LX

Top secret!

I’ve gotten approval to share this, but the actual purpose is still classified. All that needs to be said is that it’s a studio backdrop. This is my first time making an animated one, so I finally understand what keyframes are.

There’ll be a few more versions coming up, and you’ll see them all soon, I think?

TTGDP Banner 5

Initially, I was trying to draft this in Photoshop, with placeholder blobs of text. That didn’t really work. The format here is pretty particular, with the length and hierarchy of various text blocks. This is where I got with actually making a vector draft:

Some stuff could still be fine-tuned… especially the image layout. This was really just my best attempt to fit the text and images at all, without considering eye flow too much. There’s probably a better way to structure it, though the volume and assymetry of material leaves not that much wiggle room.

Week 3

January 28, 2023 By Daniela Caballero

Week 3

Web Accessibility Standards

Started on: January 23, 2023

Completed on: January 26, 2023

STA Guidance: Valerie Tran

Description: Web Accessibility Standards

This week I completed a training on web accessibility standards. This training helped me learn the basics of how to design websites and create graphics to be more accessible to users. Three of the main concepts I gathered where that 1) text on a background picture or color needs to have enough contrast for the user to be able to see it. 2) Text and elements of an info graphic/webpage also have to be large enough for the user to see them and lastly, 3) Web pages must have a clear HTML hierarchy (this means usage of headers when the developer wants to highlight a main point) since component files of a the page might be used with other applications (such as text-to-speech) to provide accessibility. If the correct elements are not used, then the text-to-speech process might be inaccurate.

Part I: Infographics

The first part of this training involved an assignment in which I had to find two graphics online and tweak them to be more accessible to users. The first graphic I found was an infographic about mRNA vaccination. I used a tool that checks the contrast between a text color and a background color to identify that the contrast was very low on this graphic. I made some adjustments to the improve the contrast on Figma. First, I lightened the background and then darkened the color of all the text until the Coolors tools approved the contrast level. I was still have issues seeing the text so I also increased the font size and adjusted some of the pictures on the graphic. In order to do this I cut out sections of the images on I wanted to re-size, saved them as PNGs, placed a rectangle of the same color of the graphic to cover the image and then pasted the re-sized PNGs of it onto the rectangle.

Infographic 1 (original)

Infographic 1 (edited)
infographic_1_edited

For the second infographic, I followed a similar process of identifying where the contrast failed to meet accessibility standards and adjusted in on Figma. Editing this graphic was slightly more challenging since there were elements (the yellow circular icons) that were originally on a different color background. I learned how to use the tools to create and cut out sections on Figma and how to delete parts on Mac Photo Preview.

Infographic 2 (original)