My Experience with Character Design
A Superman rip-off was the first character I ever designed and wrote about when I was little. Elementary school me thought the idea of a young girl who was actually a princess from a long-destroyed alien planet was the coolest thing ever. She was my first character ever, and because of that, she holds a very special place in my heart. But looking back, she was obviously not well-designed or written. Not that she really needed to be, she was just an outlet for my creativity.
After my first character, I've learned a significant amount about character creation, and now, I follow my own method of design and writing. While I still have a lot to learn, I believe my current thought process is strong and a good basis to build off of.
When writing, my personal golden rule is to know more about my characters than anyone else. What I plan to show the audience, while fully flushed out, won't be everything. Why? For one main reason: the audience doesn't want to know everything. That would get boring quickly. They don't need to know a ranked list of my character's favorite foods or their feelings on the background characters.
But that doesn't mean I don't know those things because whether anyone knows them or not, even the most basic and simple things can change how a character acts.
When you think about your identity, people often describe it as the more prominent factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, and class. While those are all valid parts of your identity, things like your favorite food, your least favorite color, and your taste in music are also parts of your identity. They make up your character and have factors in your decision-making even if you don't realize it.
Major things to know about your character include
What was their past like?
What is their goal?
What is their biggest strength?
What is their biggest weakness?
How do they view the world?
What are their relationships with other characters like?
(Glatch, Smith 2024)
Minor things to know about your characters include:
What’s in their bag?
How do they get money?
What are their pet peeves?
What is their guilty pleasure?
What was their most embarrassing moment?
Once you know more about your character, it becomes much easier to write what they would do in a situation, not what you need them to do to get the plot moving along.
When it comes to character design, many different techniques are used. Stylization, shape language, color, all of these eventually come together to create the final character and cast. Some things to keep in mind when designing characters are:
Stylization:
Is your style realistic, anime-like, or shape-heavy? Your style will affect your theme whether you want it to or not. This is not to say that you can't use certain styles for specific genres or themes, but how you write will become much more vital if they clash. For example, many people find cartoonish styles hard to take seriously, so it might not be the strongest option for a tense or serious project. That doesn't mean it can't be used, but you must be more thoughtful about everything to get that theme across.
Color
Color is an extremely powerful thing when it comes to characterization. It makes characters appealing fundamentally and can tell the audience how to feel about your characters. It also can show how the characters themselves feel. For example, a timid or shy character wouldn't wear colors that stick out and draw attention, and if they did, their body language and actions might be even more closed off to account for that. A tried and true basic color palette is mainly picking analogous colors and including one or two complementary colors to stick out against them. This makes the design more three-dimensional without being an eyesore. This should not be the case for all characters in a cast as that would get boring quickly, but it is well-liked and tends to work out nicely.
Shape
While it can be difficult to use depending on your style, shape language is a handy tool. Oftentimes, you may hear something like circles are comfortable and soft, squares/rectangles are reliable and strong, and triangles are dangerous and sharp. A good way to tell if your character's shape language is strong is by coloring all of them to look like a silhouette and then analyzing that. A good cast of characters should have a diverse set of silhouettes and can easily be told apart. As an example, take a look at the silhouettes of the main characters in the show Steven Universe.
Research
A story set in a historical period should have characters that look like they belong in that setting unless the goal is to have the characters look like they don't belong intentionally. It's essential to research your setting while designing, especially if your setting or characters involve a real-life culture. Know what is respectful and disrespectful and take it into heavy consideration.
Design and writing should go hand in hand. A character's life and history will affect how they look and vice versa. If you write about a character who looks different from how they act, that's great! You now have to write that character as someone who dresses differently than they act. You don't get a pass to write or design a character however you want, with no thought behind it.
Character creation is a very thoughtful process. Care and dedication must be put into every step in order to get a truly great final product. It's hard, time-consuming work, but the final piece is entirely worth it. (947 words)
Resources
Steven Universe. Created by Rebecca Sugar, Cartoon Network.
Glatch, Sean, and Jack Smith. “Character Development Definition: A Look at 40 Character Traits.” Writers.Com, 2024, https://writers.com/character-development-definition. Accessed 2025.
