How to Think About Character Design

Written By Stephanie Broder

Character design is one of my absolute FAVOURITE things to work on! Through creating characters, we can tell stories, learn about effective visual design, and put little pieces of ourselves out into the world.

I love character design so much I made 100 characters in 100 days

Check out a few of my faves throughout this post!

But if you’re brand new to character design, it may be hard to know where to begin. Here are some things you should be thinking about as you begin to create your character:

  1. Medium and story: Character design is all around us in animation, children’s books, comics, book covers, advertisements, merchandise and more. Knowing what medium your character is for will inform design. Do they need to convert easily to a sewable pattern for a cute plush? Or loan themselves well to repeats in a hand-drawn animation? And once you know their medium, make sure you know at least a bit about their story! Things like genre and intended audience play a big role in visual choices.

  2. Visual Style: You may think it’s ok to just design a character in your style, but I believe everyone has range even within their own familiarities. Plan ahead for how much you want to push your character on a spectrum from realistic to cartoonish. Do you like bright, saturated colours or a moody greyscale? Are you leaning into naturalized proportions or creating exaggerations?


3. Silhouette and Shape Language: If your character can be recognized by their silhouette alone, you are well on your way! In order to make this possible, think about the basic shapes (such as triangles, rectangles, circles, teardrops, etc) you use to build your character. Can you harmonize them across the design? Can you make them suit the character’s personality? Can you have contrast amongst the shape language in your cast of characters? Shape language is one of the most overlooked but most essential pieces of successful character design, in my opinion!

4. Colour Palette: Colours should suit the overall world and story of the character, but within that, there’s lots of room for play. What’s your character’s favourite colour? Do the colours they choose represent their culture or family? Colour can be used to give a sense of their alignment, too. Heroes often have primary colour schemes, with villains in secondary colours. But some turn this on their head and create an anti-hero with a secondary colour scheme. Colour shouldn’t be just a random choice but should add to the character and story.

5. Distinctive Features: There are so many ways to make a character distinctive that we often don’t even realize it. Here’s the list I give to all of my character design classes:

  • Height

  • Weight

  • Muscle mass

  • Species

  • Colours (costume, skin, hair, eyes)

  • Cultures/backgrounds

  • Clothing

  • Hairstyles

  • Facial Features

  • Gender & Gender Expression

  • Basic Shapes

  • Body Parts

  • Age

  • Movement Aids

  • Prosthetics

  • Body Modifications

  • Birthmarks

  • etc…

And of course, the most important thing is have fun! There are characters inside you that only you can create. The world needs to see them.

Stephanie Broder
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