Dummy's Guide to Character Design

December 4, 2023 - Published

Obvious usual disclaimer: do whatever you want with this advice! You can use it, you can ignore it, you can take parts of it, but either way, this is how I approach character design. As you can tell from my website banner, I've designed a lot of characters! I can claim a decent amount of popularity for some of them, being designed for video games and even getting fanart.

Character design can be a pretty complicated topic, but I'll try to go over some basic "rules" to simplify things. As always, rules can be broken, but the underlying rule for anything in art is to decide what your goal is, and try to achieve that goal however you think is best. If you break rules for the sake of breaking rules, then that will usually create things that are unappealing to most people. However, if you have a goal that will inherently break what is conventionally appealing, or subverts expectations, then go for it!

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, then we'll start with rule #1!

#1: Different shapes give off different impressions

Character design 101 begins at shape design. While you might want to work on a character's face or species or their sick scars, their silhouette is more likely the first thing that your brain processes. The commonly agreed 3 basic shapes for silhouettes are the square, circle, and triangle.

The square is sturdy, predictable. It has a strong base, and is generally reliable.

The circle is round, soft. It has the impression of being moldable, and is generally harmless.

The triangle is sharp, dynamic. It has the impression of being dangerous, and is generally unpredictable.

(some descriptions taken from this guide)

As long as you start with a basic personality for your character, you should be able to use shape design to communicate what that personality is. Let's look at some famous examples!

Ryu from Street Fighter is built like a brick, as someone who is both a martial artist and probably the most reliable character in the Street Fighter universe. No matter the point in his story, he will always be training to be the best fighter he can be, and always be both immensely serious yet kindhearted. As the player, you can always rely on Ryu to have almost the exact same moveset regardless of what game he's in, even outside of his own series! However, this reliability also means that his moveset has no clear strengths or weaknesses, and a rather boring character by many.

Kirby is the quintessential circular character, and that's because he exudes the personality of one, too! He's cute, soft, and round, with a very friendly and happy demeanor. Just by that smile, you know that it'd be very difficult for anyone to not immediately love him to bits. However, he breaks some expectations by being a lot more indestructible than he looks, and a lot more powerful, too. I'll leave those parts to the people familiar with Kirby lore, though... circular characters will often have some sort of obvious weakness, whether it be physical or psychological. Kirby has neither! Maybe you could call him well-rounded.

Ridley is an evil mastermind. He killed both of Samus' parents, and he'd do it again, too. He's evil, hyper-intelligent, and extremely deadly, if it wasn't obvious by the spikes on every one of his limbs. He also has an appearance in nearly every Metroid game because despite being defeated as a boss, he just keeps coming back and refuses to die. The design communicates one very obvious message: don't mess with Ridley!

As an extra example, here's Bowser! You might've already realized, but not every character needs to represent just one shape -- the vast majority of characters will represent either more than one shape, or modified versions of the basic 3 shapes (i.e. a square shape rarely means a LITERAL square, it can refer to any shape that's roughly boxy, even if it has rounded corners).

Bowser has lots of spikes because he's a dangerous villain, but he's also built rather rectangular too, because he's not very unpredictable. He's shown to be a rather good and reliable father, and his evil plans are generally the exact same thing (kidnap princess, hide in castle, get defeated, repeat). There are also a lot of softened edges and rounder areas like his snout, which can be because 1) they want to make him appealing to kids by not being too scary, and/or 2) show that he's not actually as threatening as he might initially seem.

Ideally, you want character silhouette to match with their personality for a number of reasons. In games, if you want to get an immediate reaction out of the player (e.g. "wow, I really like my player character!" or "wow, that villain is really scary!"), then shape design will often help with that. It will also avoid dissonance, which can put people off. If a character looks scary, but the game tries to convince you into liking them, it might be more difficult to do so without making them look more appealing. However, you can also play with that dissonance to your advantage -- this will usually be harder to do, but just know that shape design is a tool like anything else.

As an extra note, you may have heard the meme "a good character design is recognizable just from the silhouette." This is genuinely good character design advice, but it's always noteworthy that when starting out, you shouldn't worry too much about a character being unique or recognizable, in my opinion. It's just generally good practice to 1) keep characters distinguishable so people don't confuse them, and 2) make a character recognizable if you want them to be popular.

#2: Don't overuse colors

I won't go over colors in much detail since I already wrote an article on color theory which should cover everything I would talk about (color psychology especially can help you decide a color scheme for your character). Regardless, I would like to restate one of the rules for this article: don't overuse big bright colors! Generally speaking, I doubt you want your character to be an absolute eyesore, so usually characters will have 1 or MAYBE 2 primary colors, with the rest being desaturated or neutral. I will use multiple stereotypically bright and colorful cartoon characters as an example to push my point.

We can make a few rules of thumb based on these examples:

1. For bright and saturated colors, you generally only want 2 max as your character's main colors

2. If you want more bright colors, they should only be relegated to accents / very small parts of the character, e.g. eye color

3. To balance out these colors, you will usually very neutral tones for the rest of the design (black, white, shades of brown)

 What would it look like if we broke these rules?

#3: Character designs should only communicate 1-2 primary ideas

This is probably my most common gripe with character designs I dislike. Since every part of your character will be competing each other for prominence, having something extraneous, unrelated, or contradictory can distract from who your character is. If your character doesn't use a gun, then why would you include a gun holster on your character (I love you Captain Falcon, but why?). If your character is a serious and level-headed detective, then why would they have a huge doofy hat and revealing miniskirt (this one is for Caitlyn's pre-rework design in League of Legends, and there's a reason it was reworked!).

On the other hand, even if it IS relevant, it doesn't need to be directly referenced in the character design. Your character can have a huge complex story and backstory, but they do not need to display every single thing on their design.

One of my favorite examples of this is Killua! He's a character from Hunter X Hunter, and is one of the most complex characters in the series, as well as one of the most popular ones. However, he has an incredibly simple outfit, because it makes sense with how he wants to be presented: a normal kid who doesn't want anything to do with his parents. There are parts of him that hint at his backstory -- he has a number of sharp edges, and his pale skin comes off as unnatural -- but for the most part there's no need for his design to communicate all parts of his character (on top of the obvious fact that it works much better as a twist later on). 

Notably, that dissonance works because based on the setting, we KNOW that Killua can't be a normal kid, and that he's hiding something powerful. If this were presented in a different context, then it might be confusing or alienate potential fans who expect something else.

My example of this effect happening is Tadano from Aggretsuko. He came off to me as a nice relatable character in his first appearance, but the plot revealed that he was very much not relatable in the slightest. It was great for the plot, but it decidedly made me like the character a lot less, and was much less expected since this was before Aggretsuko became known for off-the-rails character plot events. This was just my personal experience though, and doesn't seem to be a widely prevailing opinion.

Anyway, unless your character has a massive plot twist, they should generally wear their character on their sleeves (pun intended). A character's outfit should make sense with who they are, what they do, where they live, and what kind of world they're in, otherwise it'll create dissonance. If a character lives in ancient times, they should not have modern clothing, unless they're specifically a time traveler and that's their entire thing. If a character is dark and moody, then it wouldn't make sense for them to wear bright clothes, because that doesn't match their personality and would make them less believable. If a character functions as a tank in a video game, then they should look big and solid and bulky, otherwise it'll be confusing to new players.

Generally speaking, a character design should only push a few ideas. A plumber who's agile. A hedgehog who's cool and fast. A tactician swordsman who uses magic. Even if it doesn't sound like much, you need EVERYTHING in the character design to push for those goals -- their clothes, their shapes, their face, their poses, their color, etc. -- and if you have too many goals, then it'll just look confusing. I actually recommend that you only focus on 1 goal as a main one, then 1-2 secondary goals, since that'll create a visual hierarchy, which will make it easier for people to digest. If you have trouble boiling down your character in that way, then you may have to think more about who they are and what their function is in the story you want to tell.

Aaaaand that's about it! There's a lot more I can talk about character design, but that covers the basics. I hope this can help somebody, and if not, I can definitely make edits and/or follow-up articles.

• Vecderg