Media arts internship February 12, 2015

I’m finally home, so I was able to finish the flowchart infographic by adding a couple graphics. I uploaded the new version and added it to the post I had created last week. The post is scheduled for Friday morning.

I’m including the journal log for another hour I did on February 9th, because I did another hour of my internship after I had already logged the hours and written the journal entry. I had planned to include it in the next day’s work, but I got caught up in some other things that kept me from doing any internship hours. Anyways, late in the evening February 9, I decided to gather some ideas for a fun project I wanted to do later in the Spring or even early in the season. The Astros ballpark has a couple goofy elements to it that they’re thinking of changing in the future. One of them being Tal’s hill which is a small hill in centerfield in play. I had the idea of making some changes to the hill in Photoshop and wanted to get some interaction going on the sites Twitter account, so I asked our followers, “what changes they would make to Tal’s Hill.” I’ll take those ideas and do some Photoshop work to Tal’s hill. Except that our graphics designer Ryan saw what I asked on Twitter and started to Photoshop some of those ideas. Here is what he did.

Some good stuff there. I’ll be adding my own additions to it and creating a post for the site.

The last part of February 12 I spent creating the main logo for our Astros Fan Favorite March Madness Tournament event. Here’s what that looks like.

Kind of plain, but I’m hoping to improve upon it the next few days.

Media arts internship February 9, 2015

I finalized the graphics for both the Spring Training roster and March Madness bracket I created. There are a lot of names on the graphics so I wanted to make sure the alignment was good and that all the player’s names were spelled correctly. I spoke logistics with our graphics designed about the other march madness graphics and some other things. I decided we needed a priority list for graphics so that we had some sort of structure and a way to prioritize what needed to be done.

This will help me identify what I need to be working on and in the event that I’m waiting on something, what I can be working on next. It also helps me map out the next month or so and give me deadlines for getting stuff done. The TBD items are ideas of projects I’d like to do, but don’t have a pressing need to get done.

Finally, I put together our show notes for the next podcast which we have scheduled to record this Sunday. I simply copy the old notes in Google Docs, change the dates and take out all the previous topics, put in new topics and then share with my co-hosts. I also sometimes go to social media for questions and topic ideas from our listenership. We’re going to go back to a weekly schedule starting this week so the questions will be a big help to fill the time.

Media arts internship February 8, 2015

I finished the Spring Training roster graphic:

I still need to go back and make sure that all the names are spelled correctly and make sure everything is aligned correctly.

I also updated the bracket graphic we use for our March Madness series that runs through Spring Training. It’s a fun event that helps our community get through Spring Training, while learning a little bit about each player. We have two players faceoff against each by reader vote. The player with the most votes after a 24-hour period advances to the next round. I’ve run it the last two years, but handed it off to someone else this year so that I could focus on my media arts internship. However, I’ll be doing the graphics for the event. That includes updating the graphic and creating the images for use with the posts.

The bracket is the first thing that needs to be done, because it gives us the matchups for the posts. This year I decided to seed them by last years results and sprinkle all the new acquisitions into the bracket. Because I was using the graphic from last year all I had to do was click on each spot and type in the new name for that spot. I then had to get the dates for each round and update them at the top.

I of course need to go back through this one as well and tighten up alignment and any fix any spelling errors. 

Media arts internship February 7, 2015

Worked on the post for offseason transaction flowchart post. After I finished the infographic I had sent it to the listserv for feedback. I figured the gaming reference would be lost by most, which is fine because it’s not necessary to understand the graphic. What I didn’t realize was that some didn’t get the John Madden reference or thought I meant Joe Madden, who is the current major league manager for the Chicago Cubs. In the post I tried to account for those references. I also wrote up a statistics and facts section to go along with the flowchart that I realized I should probably put on the infographic at the bottom. I am currently traveling so I will have to do that when I get home. I also might throw some other graphics onto flowchart next to the names of players. Currently I have one image of the Astros GM at the top and four for the players acquired this offseason. The astros acquired a total of 10 players this offseason. I was going to schedule for Tuesday but I’ll have to push that back to Thursday or Friday.

While browsing social media I found a tweet that was worth a FanShot on our site. A FanShot is a short post meant to highlight an interesting link, video, social media post or other form of media quickly. They don’t take long to setup and can sometimes bring in some decent traffic to the site.

http://www.crawfishboxes.com/2015/2/7/7998819/best-tweet-ever

I then continued my work on the Spring Training Astros roster. I had to increase the canvas size a few times to get the space right for all the names and words. I added some color to the graphic in sections. I then had a discussion with our graphics artists on the site, Ryan, about it and asked him for feedback. He suggested giving it a spreadsheet texture. I went and screenshotted a spreadsheet from Google Docs and put that unders the names and words, but over the colors and background. I then lowered the opacity so the color could come through. Ryan had also suggested to drop the intensity of the color, which the spreadsheet texture did for me. Overall I’m happy with the progress, but I’ll need to break out the names individually. I had them in sections, but to make them fit on the spreadsheet correctly I need to break them out individually. This will also allow me to more easily dim the words when a player is removed from the Spring Training roster. I intend to have all the names start with a drop shadow, and the take that effect away and drop the opacity, when a player is taken off the roster.

Here's the first version:

Here's the second version:

Media arts internship February 6, 2015

I worked on creating the Astros Spring Training roster infographic. I got all the names down on the infographic, then realized I should have picked the font and size before doing that because I had to go back and change the font and size for everything. I then started trying to figure out how I was going to lay everything out with the information I needed. I probably need increase the size of the canvas to get everything to fit and not look so squashed together.