Media arts internship February 16, 2015

I edited the podcast we recorded last night and created the post for the episode, which is scheduled for its typical Tuesday morning release. I also started prep for next week’s episode. Today Baseball Prospectus came out with its organizational rankings and the Astros were farther down on the list than most of us expected, which makes for some potentially good content on the next recording. I also had to schedule another co-host because one of mine wasn’t sure if he would be able to make it next Sunday.

I then created and scheduled the post for Friday for our Spring Training infographic. Then I began work on refreshing a graphic for our minor league content. Here’s what we had as just a general graphic for use:

I created this graphic a few years ago so it’s due for a remake. I’d like to keep the bus, but I might have to ditch it entirely. I really like what I’m doing with backgrounds of the images I’m creating, but I think the letters and the display of those letters needs to be better. I’m going to see if I can improve that for my next graphic. The infographics seem to be coming together nicely so far; the graphics on the other hand are a bit frustrating to work with.

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 January 14, 2015

Graphic creation and stuff

Tonight I continued my work on the countdown graphics, but also worked on some other graphics due to a trade the Houston Astros made today. The Astros acquired two players from the Atlanta Braves for three prospects. Once the trade was made I created some complementary graphics for our Facebook and Twitter pages. SB Nation would like to get more activity out of Facebook and a good way to do that is to post media content on the site. I made a couple memes that either commented on the trade

Post by The Crawfish Boxes.

Or quoted some comments from the Astros general manager on the trade

Post by The Crawfish Boxes.

We’ve gotten good responses to both posts so far. I was also able to find, via Twitter, a YouTube video of one of the Astros new players and posted it on the site.

www.crawfishboxes.com/2015/1/14/7550465/evan-gattis-has-his-own-song-what

I also coordinated a few things for our podcast. During the offseason we typically have a podcast every other week, during the season is weekly, but we’re going to make an exception this week because of the trade and because the week after is our Top 30 prospect special, which I also started coordinating what time people can be available. Back to this Sunday’s recording, I had to coordinate with my co-hosts to see if at least one of them is available for our usual Sunday recording.