Andrew J. Roback

Portfolio


All video content and graphics on this site are my intellectual property and may not be reused or remixed without my express written permission.

Video tutorials

Important Ideas in Technical Communication p. 1: Risk Assessment

Doc Design Tutorials p. 1: Setting up Scribus (first in nine video series)

Solution guide to accessible HTML exercise with AI assist demo

Noir-themed tutorial on editing images

Tutorial on AI features in InDesign and Photoshop

Recap of "Icon Pictionary," a game I play with my tech comm students

"Creating a profile on WikkaWiki"

"git and GitHub - Getting started"

"Writing for the Web - Tools (p. 1)"

Websites

A screenshot of the Y2K Hotline Simulator website depicting one of the menu options.

Y2K Federal Information Center Hotline Simulator

Created after teaching my Culture and History of the 1990s Internet course. This is a recreation of the federal government’s Y2K information hotline with a working touch-tone navigation and audio of the script as preserved on the Internet Archive. More details on the history behind this site and how I created it can be found by clicking the about link on the landing page. [visit site]

A screenshot of the Accessibility Audit webpage demonstrating several visible problems like low contrast text, text stored as image, and overlapping elements.

Accessibility Audit

Students use their browser's developer tool along with knowledge of common accessibility issues to audit this site. There are seven or eight major accessibility issues that we cover in the lesson. If you'd like to see a summary of the problems, view the “solutions.txt” file in the same directory. [visit site]

A screenshot of the Form Nightmare landing page. The page has a classic horror font and brief instructions for how to complete the exercise and traverse the site.

Form Nightmare

This website is based on an actual support ticket platform that I used in the past. There are many problems with the form, most having to do with poor design choices and overly restrictive validation. Students attempt to negotiate the form individually, then we discuss the questions on the landing page along with some accessibility considerations when designing forms. [visit site]

A screenshot of the Course Playlist site with a brief description and the first iFrame containing one of the playlists I created from my students' musical selections.

Course Playlist: The Vietnam War & American Culture

For my Vietnam War and American Culture course, I assigned students four different time periods and gave them some example songs and background information about popular music during that time period. Students selected a song and discussed how it related to the war, time period, or cultural objects we analyzed for class. I created this simple site with iframes for each playlist so students could listen to all of their classmates' selections (requires Spotify subscription to listen). [visit site]

Graphic design

Graphic showing a dazed stick figure educator surrounded by learning terms in various fonts with a question-mark-patterned background.

Graphic from article on differentiated instruction published in ASCD Quarterly (Fall 2024).

Graphic depicting the carbon sheets that go between sheets in carbon copy packets versus carbonless paper.

Video graphic on difference between carbon copies and NCR paper.

A handout with a map of Westchester and numbers corresponding to a key listing the various subdivisions of Westchester.

Map from a handout for a project called "Voices of Westchester".

A landscape orientation slide with images of the molecular model of tear gas and police firing tear gas at protestors. The slide also contains facts about tear gas.

Excerpt from slides on militarized police equipment.

A handout with explanator text and a word bank that children use to fill in blanks. The right side is a diagram of a tree and root system demonstrating the photosynthesis process and how trees store carbon from the atmosphere.

Excerpt from infographic on Amazon Rainforest fires.

An annotated user interface for the Zotero standalone application depicting various functions of buttons and links.

Excerpt from guide to using Zotero standalone with labeled UI.

A handout with an excerpt of Franklin's autobiography, his famous chart depicting how he spent each day, and a portrait of Franklin in the fur hat he wore to Paris. The handout contains educational blurbs for children learning about Franklin.

Handout on Benjamin Franklin with excerpt from his autobiography.

A handout with four different versions of the American flag and some history about its design and how displaying a flag publicly was popularized.

Handout on history of U.S. flag.

A two-page spread for a childrens' book on the solar system showing two space probes along with an exercise where children can track how far Voyager I is away from Earth.

Children's book on solar system. Full spread. Accordion bound.

A worksheet with polygons and blanks to write the length of each side when students are using a rule to measure their perimeter.

Worksheet to practice metric measurements.

A conference poster with findngs from a research study conduced on how citizens use Twitter to talk to their members of Congress.

Poster for CSCW conference. Content: co-authored. Poster design: mine. Actual size: 48" x 36"

A model depicting various user roles on social media with arrows depicting their transition to different roles.

Model presented at InfoSocial conference.

A flow chart with varous shaped process icons depicting how data was collected for my dissertation.

Flow chart of collection and data cleaning methods for social media study.

A slide showing the user interface of a tweet page on Twitter with callouts that contain the associated JSON components pulled from API queries.

Slide showing different JSON components of a tweet for a talk I gave to high school kids on internet research.

A four panel set of illustrations with simple stick figures and line drawings that reinforce the text of the instructions for placing a humidifier in your home.

Visual redesign of bad FrameMaker instructions from a consumer product.

A poster advertizing the writing contest with 'YOU ARE A WRITER' emblazoned above a giant desk and chair statue set in a sunny field with a crowd of people admiring the sculture.

Bulletin board ad for writing contest. Actual size: tabloid.

A large poster reading 'WELCOME WRITERS' and listing the winners of the contest. The text is superimposed on a photograph of the glass doors at the McCormick-Tribune Campus Center on Illinois Tech's campus which have icons set in relief of circles of frosted glass in a grid pattern. The four icons pictured are a person working on a laptop at a desk, a lightbulb, and text callout, and a heart.

Display poster for contest reception. Actual size: 24" x 36"

A school poster with arrival and dismissal protocols that students are supposed to follow.

Protocol poster for elementary school. Part of a series. Actual size: tabloid.

A photo of the protocol posters hanging on a white cinderblock wall at the entrance of St. Paul school in the Ausitn neighborhood of Chicago.

Photograph of all six posters in elementary school series.

The alminac pages pictured for September fourth and seventh contain a factoid about 'The Price is Right' and a photo of a widow and small boy rolling cigarettes in 1909 accompanied by a factoid about child labor laws.

Pages from an almanac I authored and designed: 260 pages, double-sided, spiral bound, 2-up.

A photograph of two soldiers in a field in Vietnam looking at attack helicopters that fill the sky. The text is an notice for the Vietnam course I was offering in 2016. Sadly, I have lost the name of the photographer that made the image and could not find it on an AI image search.

Poster for class on Vietnam War that I taught.

A diagram of a classroom with overlapping, transparent circles indicated spacing necessary for social distancing.

Part of a booklet modeling social distancing in classrooms due to COVID-19.

An entry form with blanks for students to provide information about their writing contest submission.

Entry form for a writing contest.

Your standard, run-of-the-mill FDA nutrition facts label.

A nutrition facts label according to FDA guidelines for labeling food items.

A line graphic that I made of the solor system with simplified icons representing each planetary body as well as pattern fill regions for the asteroid belt and Kuiper Belt.

A simple line graphic of the solar system.

A still from the 'Year 1' level of the video game I made depicting a character in a top-down view on a blue game screen with various other figures and icons that have meaning in the context of the game.

Screen capture from "Dissertation: the 'game'" -- Made with Bitsy, release forthcoming.

A page from my scorebook entitled 'Example Innings' that gives a textual description of action in a fictional baseball game along with an excerpt from a scoresheet illustrating how to annotate those events in the scorebook.

Examples for a baseball scorebook I made. Release forthcoming.

The fictional Federal Van Lines logo. The word 'FEDERAL' is stylized in all upercase Arial letters with horizontal white hatching. Below are their services in red separated by blue five-point stars. To the right is the company's logo: a simplified icon of an eagle with it's wings outstretched and head turned to the right. The two halves are the red and blue colors of the organization, respectively. Simple white lines intersect with the wings and the tailfeathers.

Logo for a fictional company that I use with my students. Inspired by United Van Lines. Colors are taken from North American Van Lines.