It was graduation day at the University of Houston today, and I was assigned the task of shooting photos and getting them online as quickly as possible, with the help of a colleague.
We quickly put three photos up on the CLASS home page, and then we added the best shots to our Facebook page‘s photo album.
But I added even more to our not-so-frequently used Picasa web album. Here’s a Picasa Web Album slideshow of my favorite 100+ photos I took today:
Today, I took the CMS Basics training course, covering the newly purchased Content Management System purchased by the University of Houston. The system is HannonHill Cascade.
Recently, I wrote an article that was published on the college website and its online newsletter about awards won by five staff members in various departments around the college.
Here is an excerpt:
On Wednesday, May 5, the Human Resources Department at the University of Houston surprised the eight recipients of this year’s Staff Excellence Awards and the one recipient of the Charles F. McElhinney Distinguished Service Award, which is the highest award given for exemplary staff contribution to the university.
“I was caught off guard,” Staff Excellence Award winner Pat Sayles said. “The staff in the Dean’s Office knew, but somehow kept it quiet. I didn’t even know I had been nominated.”
I worked with the small staff of the Texas Music Festival to redesign this website and it launched in October 2009, a year before our college would launch its first website in the new HannonHill Cascade CMS purchased by the university.
It was designed to look very similar to websites that the University-level web team were creating in the CMS prior to the college’s immersion in the system.
It utilizes a template that our team in the CLASS Office of Educational Technology created to tide the college over until we could begin designing sites in the CMS.
One interesting aspect about the TMF website is that it has at least three specific audiences: First and foremost are the students, most of which will attend the orchestral summer camp and use the website to discover more information about it and meet the requirements for admission. Students who don’t wish to participate in the orchestra camp can participate in TMF Institutes that focus on four distinct areas of music instruction.
These two audiences are addressed through the gray navigation menu which I designed that is under the site’s main left navigation scheme.
The other major audience is the general public, namely those who attend the festival’s various concerts and events.
One of the most popular pages of the website is the season schedule page, which is updated frequently throughout the year as information becomes available.
Another important audience for the website is the media partners that help get the word out.
Since the website launched, the TMF staff have reported that admission applications have significantly increased and that major festival events have sold out.
I believe this has a lot to do with the website, and also the efforts TMF staff members have invested in marketing and advertising the website, with the help of freelance marketing experts who are establishing a name for the festival in the local arts community.
This is the second E-SOC newsletter that I have designed for the Department of Sociology in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Houston.
The design is based on an InDesign template that I modified for the needs of the Sociology Department.
I was responsible for laying out the content and completing the pre-press work on the newsletter and its photographs. I also suggested how to reduce the content to fit the two-page design.
I designed this website homepage with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, and it uses an open-source javascript to rotate the images.
The website is a special project of the Center for Public History, and is used in intermediate and high school classrooms to educate students about Houston black history.
Today, I finished the designs for the coozies that we will give away during our wedding.
I designed them using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator CS4.
Here they are:
Photos taken for the blue coozie were shot by Pin Lim, from our engagement photo shoot. The background of this coozie will be blue, so the ink needs to be white, and so the white ink is black above – which means it’s kind of hard to tell what this one will look like. I’m confident it will be awesome.
One of the photos taken for the white coozie was shot by Pin Lim (see the one on the far right). The others were shot myself, holding the camera out at a decent distance. This coozie was white with blue ink, so it’s not hard to see what it will look like, since the black ink above will be blue.
UPDATE: See a photo of the finished coozie, printed by Kustom Koozies, from Pin Lim’s wedding photo shoot: