Spring Commencement

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:

Update: The album from Spring 2010 commencement can be found on the new CLASS website.

Here are some of my favorite shots:

Spring 2010 Commencement

Spring 2010 Commencement

Spring 2010 Commencement

Five CLASS staff members win UH Staff Excellence Awards

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.

The story I wrote about CLASS staff members winning UH Staff Excellence awards.

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.”

Read the rest of the article in the May 2010 issue of Graffit-e.

Texas Music Festival website launches

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.

TMF
The Texas Music Festival homepage.

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.

TMF
The Texas Music Festival Season Schedule page.

Another important audience for the website is the media partners that help get the word out.

TMF
The Texas Music Festival Press Release page.

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.

E-Soc newsletter is printed

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.

E-SOC newsletter
E-Soc newsletter for Fall 2009

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.

To Bear Fruit For Our Race website launches

I designed this website homepage with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, and it uses an open-source javascript to rotate the images.

To Bear Fruit for Our Race
The To Bear Fruit for Our Race homepage

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.

Our wedding coozie designs

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:

blue coozie
The blue "formal" coozie.

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.

white coozie
The white "fun" coozie.

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:

The coozies
The coozies came out great. Our guests loved them!