Creative Character Design for Products

Creative Character Design for Products

“We have arrived at the end of this Domestika course. I hope that it has helped you to better understand some of the principles of character design. I also hope that I have given you many ideas on how to place your characters in different formats. I love creating characters. I think it is about infusing them with your own personality and interests. Throughout this course, I have shown my own method of how to design a set of unique characters that communicate ideas and emotions. In this last lesson, we’ll go through each step to develop our final projects. The first step is to understand some of the basic principles of character design. For that, I shared three of my favorite characters of all time: The Simpsons, The characters from McDonaldland, and The Garbage Pail Kids. When creating your characters, keep in mind that they need to work together, they need to share similar traits as well as their own distinctive personalities.

Then, I showed you how to understand the brief for the project and its terms. Once we had done this, we started by listing possible themes and how to translate them into a mood board. What topics are you interested in? Can particular hobbies, activities, TV Shows, or places that you are interested in being included in your character designs? Your mood board should be a reflection of your personality and interests. After that, I taught you how to create a fun and interesting colour palette to start designing your set of characters. Colour is a powerful tool to create unity across design so be mindful of your choices. The next step was to start sketching your characters, I like to do this part of the process by drawing directly into paper. It is a good idea to separate the parts of your characters on paper and assemble them in Adobe Illustrator. This way you can change the position and size of the parts easily. You will repeat the process of roughing your characters until you have 10 to 15 roughs. I like placing all my designs in one document and see how they work together as a set. What is working and what is not? Do they work as a set? Which one is the strongest in your set and why? Which ones communicate your theme in the best way? Once we transferred our sketches to a digital processor, we will make the final arrangements before getting the illustration ready to be printed on a piece of fabric, namely a T-Shirt. We have covered two ways in-depth: individual prints (motif+messaging), and all-over prints. Thank you for coming along on this journey! I hope this course has been useful whether you are an illustrator, a designer, or just someone who enjoys creating funny or weird characters. You’ll find inspiration and feedback from other students in the forum and I encourage you to participate and comment. Share your final project, I would really enjoy seeing what you come up with. Thank you and goodbye! ”

Partial transcription of the video

“Final Project It's the end of this Domestika course. I hope that it has helped you to better understand character design. I hope you've had ideas of how to place your characters in different formats. I love creating characters. Infuse them with your own personality and interests. I've shown you my own method for creating a set of characters that convey ideas and emotions. We'll go through each step to develop your own final project. The first step is to understand some principles of character design. I showed you three of my favourite character designs: "The Simpsons", the characters from M...”

This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.

Course summary for: Creative Character Design for Products

• Level: Beginner
• 98% positive reviews (50)
• 930 students
• 4 units
• 16 lessons (2h 1m)
• 8 downloads

• Category

  Illustration

• Software

  Adobe Illustrator

• Areas

  Character Design, Digital Illustration, Traditional illustration