maxneal.com - BUPSE -

Whenever I approach a new piece, I try and remember the acronym BUPSE which stands for balance, unity, proportion, sequence, and emphasis. Let's look at each of these components individually...

Balance: this concept illustrates how your document is weighted. Does it have an even, natural feel to it? Or, are you playing with the reader's expectations and presenting an unbalanced document? Both approaches work, but you should decide before-hand how you are going to approach balancing your document.

Unity: do all the components in your piece match? Is there a unifying theme? Imagine designing a piece for Coca-Cola. Most of your creations would play off of the red and white theme which they are known for. Think about your creation and how unified it looks in order to make a lasting connection with the viewer.

Proportion: in many ways, this principle relates to balance. Do the components of your piece fit in relation to each other? Is the numbered sequence even or odd? How will you use that to your advantage? Proportion can either help you to please the reader's eye or draw their attention to a specific image.

Sequence: how do you want your viewer to navigate the document? Always remember this as your audience is looking for a pattern. You can't always assume that they will read from top-to-bottom and from left-to-right. Maybe you want to play with their expectations? Remember this concept when trying to create an effective document.

Emphasis: what is the most important message that you want to convey to your audience? You might only have a few seconds to relay this information if, for example, you were designing a highway billboard. Utilizing the principle of emphasis means drawing your reader's attention right away and letting them know why they need to pay attention to your piece.

Here is a video that I made which illustrates these concepts...

Here is a very challenging assignment from my time at Rasmussen College. In this particular project I had to work with Adobe Flash to make games...I had absolutely no experience with this! I did my best to understand the program and how to manipulate the code; now I have a matching game that uses some pre-existing code from my course textbook and incorporates some of the video from the above sample.

When you are ready to give the game a try, hit refresh on your browser to see the intro for this game or click here to launch the game in a new window.