This week, we have Abbie to talk about principles in character design. Character design is to visually define a character’s physical appearance, and from that gives the player a peek at their personality and background. Clothes, makeup, and hairstyle are some of the most basic ways a human can use to express themselves; they reflect a person’s characteristics. Therefore, character design needs to happen in tandem with other design aspects.
According to Abibie, three main things need to be considered when designing a character are color, shape, and narrative. Color is the simplest way to show the character’s personality: bright and warm colors are usually associated with a passionate, young, short-tempered person, while cold and dark colors usually reflect a calm and wise person, someone with brain over brawn. Shapes are used to accentuate a character’s personality: a character with lots of square shapes usually has strict and serious characteristics, while a circle shapes are for more silly and soft characters. A character’s pose should add to their iconography, and people should recognize them with their silhouette alone. Finally, a character’s appearance could say something about their background. Why did they get a scar or a tattoo? How did they get them? How would they feel about them? Can we justify their features through narrative design?
We have a task from Abbie to design our character, and for non-artists, we could do a mood board instead. Even if designing is not my expertise, I should be able to tell my designer my vision of the character’s appearance and make sure they know exactly what I’m looking for.
This is the mood board I made during the session:
This is my idea of the head part of my main character. (Ideation: Character design). It definitely needs a lot more text and description. I also want to change it from a moodboard to a concept board and add what I want and don’t want it to turn out.
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