20 top character design tips

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Character design can be a tricky illustration beast to tackle. You may know how to draw dynamic characters, but designing your own character from scratch involves a lot of creative thinking. Although many of the classic characters familiar to us all through cartoons, movies and advertising look simple, that simplicity usually belies the many hours of work that have gone into their development.

From Mickey Mouse's famous three-fingered hands – drawn to save production time when he was first developed for animations in the 1920s – to the elegant simplicity of Homer Simpson, character design has always been about keeping it simple.

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But aside from clean lines and easily readable features, what else are you going to need to know about character design? There's knowing what to exaggerate and what to play down, what to add to give a hint of background and depth, and what to do to develop personality. 

Getting started can be the trickiest part in any character design project, but once you've got some ideas these tips will help you breath life into your creation.

01. Decide who your character design is aimed at

Deciding who the character is aimed at should be one of the first steps in your design process

Think about your audience. Character designs aimed at young children, for example, are typically designed around basic shapes and bright colours. If you're working for a client, the character's target audience is usually predetermined, as Aussie artist Nathan Jurevicius explains.

"Commissioned character designs are usually more restrictive but no less creative. Clients have specific needs but also want me to do my 'thing'. Usually, I'll break down the core features and personality."

"For example, if the eyes are important then I'll focus the whole design around the face, making this the key feature that stands out."

02. Decide where your character will appear

Where will the character design be seen and in what medium? This will have a direct bearing on how you go about your character design. For example, if it's for a mobile-phone screen, there's no point designing it to have a lot of intricate details and features.

Nathan Jurevicius says that regardless of the format: "The process of thinking up concepts always starts the same: paper, pencil, green tea... lots of thumbnails, written ideas, scratches and sketches over sketches."

03. Research other designs

It can be helpful to try and deconstruct why certain character designs work and why some don't. There's no shortage of research material to be found, with illustrated characters appearing everywhere: on TV commercials, cereal boxes, shop signs, stickers on fruit, animations on mobile phones, and more. 

Study these character designs and think about what makes some successful and what in particular you like about them.

04. Make your character distinctive

Matt Groening used yellow to make The Simpsons characters stand out from the crowd

Whether you're creating a monkey, robot or monster, you can guarantee there are going to be a hundred other similar creations out there. Your character design needs to be strong and interesting in a visual sense to get people's attention.

When devising The Simpsons, Matt Groening knew he had to offer the viewers something different. He reckoned that when viewers were flicking through TV channels and came across the show, the characters' unusually bright yellow skin colour would grab their attention.

05. Use line qualities and styles to describe your character

The drawn lines of which your character design is composed can go some way to describing it. Thick, even, soft and round lines may suggest an approachable, cute character, whereas sharp, scratchy and uneven lines might point to an uneasy and erratic character.

Sune Ehlers characters are bold and seem to dance on the page, which echoes his approach to drawing them. He explains: "Drawing a doodle is about decisive pen-manoeuvring. A strong line for me comes from strength and rhythm."

06. Use exaggerated characteristics

Exaggerating the defining features of your character design will help it appear larger than life. Exaggerated features will also help viewers to identify the character's key qualities. 

Exaggeration is key in cartoon caricatures and helps emphasise certain personality traits. If your character is strong, don't just give it normal-sized bulging arms, soup them up so that they're five times as big as they should be.

07. Choose colours carefully

Colours can help communicate a character's personality. Typically, dark colours such as black, purples and greys depict baddies with malevolent intentions. 

Light colours such as white, blues, pinks and yellows express innocence, good and purity. Comic-book reds, yellows and blues might go some way to giving hero qualities to a character design.

08. Add accessories

Piggle, a vinyl toy design by TADO, interacts with its accessories

Props and clothing can help to emphasise character traits and their background. For example, scruffy clothes can be used for poor characters, and lots of diamonds and bling for tasteless rich ones. 

Accessories can also be more literal extensions of your character's personality, such as a parrot on a pirate's shoulder or a maggot in a ghoul's skull.

09. 2D or 3D?

Depending on what you have planned for your character design, you might need to work out what it will look like from all angles. A seemingly flat character can take on a whole new persona when seen from the side if, for example, it has a massive beer belly. 

If your character is going to exist within a 3D world, as an animation or even as a toy, working out its height, weight and physical shape is all important.

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10. Give your character personality

Interesting looks alone do not necessarily make for a good character design; its personality is key as well. A character's personality can be revealed through comic strips and animations, where we see how it reacts to certain situations. 

The personality of your character doesn't have to be particularly agreeable, but it does need to be interesting (unless your characters is purposely dull). Personality can also be expressed simply in how the character has been drawn.

Next page: 10 more top character design tips...

11. Focus on facial expression

Facial expression is key to a character's personality, as Tex Avery's Droopy demonstrates

Expressions showing a character's range of emotions and depicting its ups and downs will further flesh out your character. Depending on its personality, a figure's emotions might be muted and wry or explosive and wildly exaggerated.

Classic examples of this can be found in the work of the legendary Tex Avery: the eyes of his Wild Wolf character often pop out of its head when it's excited. Another example of how expressions communicate motions is deadpan Droopy, who barely registers any sort of emotion at all.

12. Give your character goals and dreams

The driving force behind a character's personality is what it wants to achieve. This missing 'something' – be it riches, a girlfriend or solving a mystery – can help to create the dramatic thrust behind the stories and adventures your character gets up to. 

Often the incompleteness or flaws in a character design are what make it interesting.

13. Build up a back story

If you're planning for your character design to exist within comics and animations then developing its back story is important. Where it comes from, how it came to exist and any life-changing events it has experienced are going to help back up the solidity of, and subsequent belief in, your character. 

Sometimes the telling of a character's back story can be more interesting than the character's present adventures (or not, in the case of the Star Wars prequels).

14. Experiment!

Don't be afraid to experiment and ignore all the rules and tips about planning and crafting the look of your character design. Going against what is supposed to be the right way of doing something could create unexpected and exciting results.

15. Make your character design flexible

Having decent materials to work with is useful, but not essential, for the early planning of your character design. A lot of amazing characters were successfully designed years ago when no-one had personal computers and Photoshop was just a dream.

The drawings of your character should still work when rendered on paper with a simple pen or, as Sune Ehlers puts it: "The character should still be able to work with a stick dipped in mud and drawn on asphalt."

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16. Swap mouse for pen

Ian of I Like Drawing generates some of his character designs away from both the computer and the sketchbook, allowing outside elements to influence his work. "I really like characters that interact with their surroundings," he says.

"The environment normally suggests an idea and then I let my strange mind do the rest. I prefer drawing in the real world with a pen instead of on the computer, because it feels good and odd things happen."

17. Get feedback from others

Show people your creations and ask them what they think. Don't just ask whether they like them or not. Instead, see if they can pick up the personalities and traits of your characters. Find who you think is the suitable or ideal audience for your work and get feedback specifically from them about it.

18. Hone, plan and polish your design

Creator of Scary Girl Nathan Jurevicius does a lot of preparatory work as part of his character design process

Instead of just drawing or doodling without too much pre-planning, Nathan Jurevicius prefers to take a different approach. 

"I take a long time creating finished looking roughs and also thinking about how the character could be expanded beyond a 2D artwork, what the character will do in a specific world, and how it speaks and acts," he says.

19. Create the right environment for your character

In the same way that you create a history for your character, you need to create an environment for it to help further cement believability in your creation. The world in which the character lives and interacts should in some way make sense to who the character is and what it gets up to.

20. Fine-tune your figure

Question each element of your creation, especially things such as its facial features. The slightest alteration can have a great effect on how your character is perceived.

Illustrator Neil McFarland advises: "Think about the meaning of the word 'character'. You're supposed to breath life into these things, make them appealing and give them the magic that will allow people to imagine what they're like to meet and how they might move. 

"I think it's strange how creating characters for the sake of it has become a distinct branch of graphic design."

This article was originally published in Computer Arts magazine. Subscribe here.

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