Farewell Letter

Dear LAITS Team,

 

Today is my last day with LAITS. I can’t believe how quickly a year has passed! I started off with minimal, high school level experience and have grown so much in this program. I’ve gained experience in photo-editing, animating, project management, s p r e a d s h e e t s, and so much more, but more importantly, this program gave me more self-confidence and pride in my work. The positivity and constant support provided by other STAs and our lovely bosses are what make this program so unique. I can’t express how grateful I am that I’ve had this job and got to work with such kind, hardworking, and insanely talented people.

 

To Suloni, Maddy, and Valerie, thank you for your motivation and kindness. I have never felt so empowered to say exactly how I feel in a workplace. You all are truly the best bosses imaginable, and I know you’ll continue to make LAITS the best workplace ever when I’m gone.

 

To Abriella, Estella, Angie, and Athena, thanks for keeping the meetings alive. Good luck filling the awkward pauses in meetings without me.

 

To ALL STAs I’ve worked with, you have all taught me something at some point or another, and for that I am extremely grateful. It is crazy to me how close I have gotten to you all despite never meeting! Hopefully I can make a visit to the office when COVID is gone…haha…if COVID is gone…

 

Thank you all and stay in touch,

 

Poonum

 

ps. I never knew what Baba meant and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.

I worked on a couple photo IDs last week but Valerie was on vacation so I gave myself feedback LOOOL

 

I love…having jokes with myself. Anyways, the photo IDs turned out fine:

Hi blog I’ve been working on a couple diff course graphics, mostly providing feedback but one course needed some zoom backdrop options for the TA so I compiled a couple from pexels / unsplash:

 

I also created a very simple course card for an edX course that will be taught through Canvas. The card is intended to represent information and resources, so I wanted to use a letter “i”:

This is in the font Didot, which I edited in Illustrator to bring the dot a bit closer to the stem of the letter:

 

A diff edX course needed a very simple powerpoint slide with a previously made icon, so I created that as well:

 

PSY Prof. Duarte Memory and Aging Lab: Banner Illustration Design

This past week, I worked on the banner illustration design for Professor Duarte’s new website. I mentioned a little bit about it in the last post. After picking a color scheme I thought would go well with the website, I began the process of making each of the silhouettes. At first, I tried using the pen tool on illustrator to create vectors, as Maddy mentioned this would be easier for changing colors. However, each one took me a long time, so I switched to photoshop and used the lasso tool. Since I was using Photoshop, it was helpful to have many layers and organized naming conventions to keep everything in check. I wanted to go for a paper cutout type effect, so I used a combination of effects like inner shadow, bevel and emboss, and pattern overlay. Since it was a lot of adjustments, what helped me speed up things was making use of the “layer styles” option. Once you have something looking the way you want it to, you click create new layer style, which can then be easily applied to the other layers. It took a bit of adjusting to get it to look right, but hopefully it does now. Below, you will find the iterations. On the left is the original design, and on the right is the design with a color overlay to help us get a better idea of what the colors would look like on the actual website.

 

This is a screenshot Maddy took of her testing the website with the banner, and it looks pretty nice I think! I think the colors worked out, so hopefully Professor Duarte likes it.

I’m looking for apartments next week, so I am moving my hours, but hopefully I can make it to the last fun times tuesday! I really like everyone on the STA team, and truthfully I am already emotional because the end is near :000. Anyway, on a personal level, I watched a video about how to read more (since this has been a long time goal of mine), and I think I am going to try out a speedreading technique. I find it really hard to enjoy books with all the other media around me, so I am thinking about not using my phone for a week once I go home. I tried this out last summer, and it was actually mind blowing how not having access to media made me crave literally any kind of mental stimulation and improved my focus dramatically. I did miss talking to my friends though. Have a safe and fun weekend!

Fall 2021 Online Courses

This week I designed digital monitor backdrops, canvas graphics, and animation intros for Fall 2021 classes. My work has mainly been on “HIS 314K- History of Mexican Americans in the US,” for which I designed a PPT template, canvas graphics, and two lecture introduction animations. And for the class “ARH 301- Introduction to Visual Arts,” I worked on a TA Stinger Animation.

 

History of Mexican Americans in the US

 

 

Introduction to Visual Arts

 

 

I also worked assets for “ECO 304K- Intro to Microeconomics” and had the chance to work in Cascade this week to update the banner on the black studies page. https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/blackstudies/

 

 

One last thing. I updated my daily plans page in Basecamp to reflect on my interests and goals for the new semester. I can’t believe summer went by so quickly!

Photo ID

Here is a photo ID I worked on today. The face was clearly visible so I didn’t make any light adjustments. I did straighten out the photo though and because the background was blurry foliage it worked well without it looking like it was titled through an edit.