How ex-Apple, Disney & Pixar artists design compelling characters
It’s no secret that Apple, Disney, and Pixar are each in a league of their own: they have a special place in the hearts of billions of people.
So when I decided to follow my dream of creating the ultimate stuffed animals, I collaborated with the most talented artists from these companies that I could find.
Together, we created award-winning Animoodles, a magnetic stuffed animal building system that you can mix and match in thousands of combinations. (Our Kickstarter campaign ends today, go check it out.)
In this article, I share some tips and techniques my team and I use to design compelling characters — and how you can do the same.
1/ Personality is the foundation
Cute faces will make you go, “Aww,” but it’s a character’s personality that will make you fall in love.
Before we put a pen to paper, we create personalities for our characters. We read about real animals, learning what habitats they live in, and looking for traits and behaviors that seem human-like. Some animals are social (know someone who makes friends easily)? Others hibernate in the winter (know someone who sleeps in a little late on weekends?).
Sammy Fox, from Animoodles Storytale Forest Collection, is passionate about acting — it’s his way of communicating with others despite the fact that he was born mute (without the ability to speak). You can tell by looking at him that he looks quiet, but is so expressive.
A character’s environment is an extension of their personality. We consider the environment the character lives in within our imaginary world: The Storytale Forest Animoodles live in a land that has a mixture of woodlands, bamboo, redwood, and alpine forest. Each character has a unique home within Storytale Forest: Jada Panda has a bamboo art gallery, and Sweetie Bee has a beehive where she serves honey tea on the patio.
A character’s personality is the most important factor in determining what a character looks like.
2/ Purposeful proportions
Character designs are often exaggerations of the real life subjects. When designing a character, remember that it is a fantasy character: it doesn’t have to be 100% realistic.
We can push the proportions into ratios that seem appealing to us.
For example, babies have large heads in comparison with their bodies, which helps make them cute.
3/ Facial feature arrangement
Try taking a character’s eyes, nose, and mouth, and simply moving it around the page.
The placement of their facial features impacts the character design. Eyes wide apart can make a character look innocent, while a low forehead can make a character seem alert.
Move the facial features around until you get a sense for the arrangement that you think conveys the character’s intended personality the best.
Character design is ultimately in the eye of the beholder, so trust your own judgment while in the early stages of character design. Let your own style show.
4/ Complexity level
How simple or detailed will your character be? Decide on the overall complexity level of your character before you start trying to convey its personality.
5/ Life is in the eyes
The eyes are the window into any character’s soul.
If you are designing a collection of characters, it’s important to have a harmonious look across the eye design of all your characters.
If your characters are to be made into physical products such as stuffed animals, spend time researching what materials your character’s eyes can be rendered in. For example, you can choose buttons, marble eyes, embroidery, hand stitching, felt, and much more.
When it comes to manufacturing physical products like Animoodles, we had to choose an eye design that allowed us enough flexibility to convey personality, while also looking believably realistic.
Miguel Frog’s eyes were designed to convey his joyful personality, and to also be easily manufactured.
6/ Shape language
In order to achieve harmony across a character collection, we create basic silhouettes of each character.
This helps us see if we have enough harmony across characters such that each character looks like it belongs with the rest. We also want just enough variety across silhouettes in order to add visual interest.
We can make shapes rounder than usual (Miguel Frog) or more angular than usual (Brady Lion). We call these lines curves and straights, and characters can have a mix of both.
7/ Rough sketches
Once we have a good feel for all of the above, we start sketching. It can be on a napkin, and it doesn’t have to look pretty.
Sometimes it takes a little while to warm up.
There’s no way to go wrong in sketching: you can learn from every try.
After warming up, refer back to the personality that you created for your character. Try to start conveying their personality using a combination of shapes, placement of facial features, proportions, curves, and straights.
You can move to ink at anytime. Sometimes changing your pen will inspire new shapes to come out.
Coloring in the character in a quick, basic way can help you better visualize the character so you can make adjustments.
We are pretty happy with the character, so we’ll make some minor adjustments, then create a character turnaround so we communicate what the character looks like from different angles.
And now we have Sammy Fox!
8/ Colors
Colors have the ability to draw the eye in; they can be harmonious or discordant. They can also convey the personality of a character.
For the Storytale Forest Animoodles, we wanted to make sure that colors were believable enough, but that offered enough variety to get the attention and interest of customers.
For example, we could have rendered both Hannah Owl and Rosie Deer in a brown color. Instead of having repetitive brown colors in the same collection, Hannah Owl is a white and gray snowy owl, which is a nice extension of her bookish and wise personality. Rosie Deer is a nature explorer, so her vibrant orange hue with white spots reflects her outgoing and energetic personality well. Then to spice things up further, we rendered Sweetie Bee with brown stripes instead of harsh pure black (she is a sweet natured bee), and we made Odin Dragon a teal green with golden horns, orange wings, purple fin, and a blue spade tail (he is an eccentric fellow).
9/ Form factor test
If you have big commercial ambitions for your characters, it’s important to test a character’s ability to translate into the physical form factor.
I have found that rendering characters as stuffed animals is a great test.
Doing this has challenges, because fabrics have different weights, levels of stretch, pile lengths, and other characteristics.
At Animoodles, we start by making plush prototypes, then adjust as needed.
We take photos of the plush prototypes, then draw over them to show the correct shapes. We will adjust the proportion of different features, such as the eyes or wings. And we will move facial features around to make sure they are shown correctly.
After iterating of plush prototypes until they match our vision as closely as possible, we are ready to move onto production.
At Animoodles, the character turnarounds don’t dictate the final character design; the plush form factor does.
10/ Make it a collection
If you’re designing a unique or complex stuffed animal like magnetic Animoodles, there are additional considerations required in order to turn it into a collection.
For us, we have to make sure all the Animoodles’ plush parts look right when they are combined together.
Depending on your product, you may need to consider factors such as custom fabric coloring, specialty materials, and fabrics that are safe for infants.
Make sure everything looks like it belongs together.
In conclusion
Many elements go into making a compelling character design. Be deliberate about creating the character’s personality, proportions, facial features, level of complexity, eye design, shape language, colors, and final form factor.
The appeal of a character design is subjective, so have fun with it. Don’t be afraid to keep iterating until you’re satisfied.
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