Ramsay MacFarlane : Design & Creation

Ramsay has graduated with a First Class Honours Degree in Applied Graphic Technology and Multimedia.

Glasgow Caledonian University

After completing an HND in Visual Information – Design & Illustration at the Glasgow Metropolitan College (formerly known as The Glasgow College of Building and Printing), Ramsay went on to study for his Degree at Glasgow Caledonian University.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time at ‘Caley Uni’, and feel I benefited tremendously from a well-rounded course. I would recommend it to anyone who is seriously considering getting into the multimedia design industry – Ramsay

The final year projects and investigations include (amongst many others!) the following two units:

Dolcis Website Prototype

Design Practice

This project involved following a ‘live brief’ supplied by a Glasgow-based design agency who were carrying out the same project at the same time. It was was aimed at providing experience in the industry and the process that must be followed to complete such a project.

This involved stages such as; project planning, identifying the target market and the tone/style of the brand, integrating existing material, technology consideration, interface design, and the prototyping and development process.

» View Dolcis Shoes Website Prototype

Design Study

Does dynamically animated interaction make a web-interface more enjoyable and effective for the user, compared to a static interface?

A screenshot of the Elite Hammer - Dynamic Prototype

Static interfaces provide users with an effective method for retrieving information. In modern society where web-use is becoming increasingly widespread and part of day-to-day life, static interfaces have become second nature to the average web-user. To stand out from the crowd of static websites and provide the user with a more enjoyable and memorable experience, a dynamically animated interface system could be produced, but at what cost?

After extensive designing, developing and testing (including using eye-tracking technology and large user-testing) the  conclusion could be summed up as:

It is possible to provide a distinctive, web-based interface by using dynamically animated interface styles, such as those developed in Flash. But by doing so, the size of the target market that can actually be reached may be adversely affected.

You can view two examples of a static and a dynamic website that were typical examples of the sites that were compared and tested:

» View Prototype 1 – Dynamic

» View Prototype 2 – Static

Another project that was completed earlier in the degree was Hippy Dave; an interactive animation for the Sequential Imagery Development module.