Role
Graphic Designer
TEAM
1 Mentor, 2 Graphic Designers
Timeline
3 months (Mar - May 2025)
overview
Helping Students on Their Data Science Journey
Data Science DISCOVERY
STAT 107 – Data Science DISCOVERY is UIUC's largest data science course, enrolling hundreds of students each semester. As a course assistant, my regular duties involve teaching a lab section and hosting office hours to help students understand statistics and Python programming concepts.
What are MicroProjects?
Alongside standard course assignments, MicroProjects are mini data science projects that explore a new dataset each week. Students have the option to complete MicroProjects for extra credit, and they're a great way to apply skills learned in class to real-world data. Topics are vast and range from weather to sports to Dungeons & Dragons!
My Role – Incentivizing Students!
In addition to my course assistant duties, I was given a fun opportunity to design trading cards that students could collect upon completing MicroProjects. Each trading card is unique to the week's dataset and encourages students to complete extra credit projects and build up their collection.
ideate
Existing Templates
Per the work of a previous designer, cards had three states:
Opening the Vault
In addition to these standard cards, I was tasked with creating card designs “from the vault" – older MicroProjects that were no longer part of the course curriculum, but were to be released to the public over the summer. Building off the standard card template, I created a vault-themed border design.
v1 design: uses a UIUC official brand color as the border, but not “vaulty" enough.
v2 design: darker border color that allows for white text, along with a more vault-like design.
deliverable
The Complete Collection
Collect Them All!
After finalizing the template, I got to work on the collection. Each card design went through multiple revisions until they were approved as final designs. Take a look below!
reflection
Collector's Commentary
Learnings & Takeaways
I loved working on this project and I had a lot of fun exercising my creativity! DISCOVERY is one of the best classes I've taken at UIUC, and I enjoyed giving back to it and working alongside my favorite professors as both a course assistant and graphic designer.
I also wasn't too experienced in Adobe Illustrator before taking on this project, but it was a great opportunity to strengthen my skills and familiarize myself with the app's various functionalities. Though it was frustrating at times, I can say that it was an awesome learning experience and I was ultimately proud of the work I produced.