Positive Mental Attitudes Logo

The team over at PMA now require easy access and control of the content that is displayed on their website, and have assigned the task of providing a new integrated website Content Management System (CMS) to Ramsay.

How we feel and think is central to the way we live our lives. Just like our physical health, our mental health can have ups and downs.

There are various other design tasks to be undertaken, with an arts activities leaflet high on a list of immediate objectives.

Check back here soon for results from the PMA project, or in the meantime visit their existing site at: positivementalattitudes.org.uk

The Centre for Political Song

The Centre for Political Song is part of the Research Collections at Glasgow Caledonian University and they “exist to promote and foster an awareness of all forms of political song”. The team is led by John Powles and is based on the University campus in Glasgow City Centre.

The project began with design of the new logo, bringing life and identity to the Centre for Political Song. It consists of the Raised Fist and the Quaver to represent the Political and Musical elements of the name in a single symbol. These items were strategically-placed to create a resemblance to the Hammer & Sickle, another iconic political symbols of history.

The website was then created using Wordpress to act as a Content Management System, giving the client the ability to edit and update the site. The Glasgow Caledonian University identity was also incorporated into the design.

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.