GOOD vs BAD Character Design: Tips and Tricks!

I feel like people are kind of missing the point, saying that BaM's redesigns are uglier. BaM deliberately overexaggerated their designs to make their point clear. Sure, I preferred the original squid girl, but the point of the exercise wasn't to make her more appealing, it was to show how shape language changes a design. Of course in a real character design you could pull back on that, maybe include some more circular shapes to combine "friendly" and "speedy", but BaM was starting at level 1 and showing how one shape can exaggerate a design. Ignore the grumbly comments, BaM. This video has been really helpful for me and I'm sure many other artists feel the same!

"That's my art style-san" Shots fired lol

"Red might feel dangerous and sexy." Elmo: hi

I think its important to realize that this is a very HEAVILY STYILIZED art style. The points are good but you can bend them and take in the ones that will/can help you with YOUR own style. You don't have to change your style to fit this video or take every point extremely seriously. Also, some tips and tricks may not apply to you and your style. Thats okay. Remember! These are tips, not "you must do these things or else your art is terrible and your characters are terrible...etc etc"

The character reveal at 4:10 was a sin to my eyes compared to the original drawing, it felt like I was staring into the sun.

"Let's take a look at bad character design." Me: questions every character I've ever drawn

"Characters rarely stand in a bright white room" Me: laughs in traditional art sketchbook

This video is a better example of why NOT to follow the rules all the time. You could follow all the rules and still end up with something that looks utterly bland or just weird.

"triangles give off dangerous and edgy feelings." the play button: e d g y n o i s es

"Color tells the story" Manga: allow me to introduce myself

"This fan-submitted artwork is good but has a few problems that makes it look bad, so we will fix a few of those!" proceeds to change their entire personality, artstyle and shape

So what I learned from this is 1. Put a bunch of shapes together to make a silhouette 2. Make sure the silhouette has defined features to make it stand out 3. Color contrast is important on both the characters and the characters with the background 3. Make it somewhat simplistic but not too much 4. Exaggerate poses but again not too much 5. All kinds of body types are good 6. Draw more shapes to make more interesting characters 7. Draw line ups (with variety) 8. Use references 9. Also good palettes 10. Story is important when going with different styles

"Green is gonna give you a feeling of safety" *Looks at Hulk

“Characters rarely stand in a bright white room” Manga artist: Yeah, about that...

2:48 conflates clarity of pose in silhouette with clarity of character in silhouette. There was nothing wrong with the character's silhouette before and was completely recognizable due to the tail, pointed arm bands, tentacles, and hat. I would wager that in a line up of silhouetted characters, she'd be distinct as is. the "fix" makes her pose more clear, but doesn't do much to define her character silhouette any more than before (and it makes her look a bit more alien, which slightly chipped away at her appeal). Her pose is also pretty unnatural looking now, as an added "bonus". And it's been mentioned in the comments plenty, but the "shape language" redesign completely butchered the appeal of the original design; so much so that I wouldn't call them the same character... if anything, it proved that combining shapes together can make a much more appealing character than dogmatically adhereing to a single shape. Just look at a few of the examples givin leading up to that redesign: Sonic in composed of triangles, and circles, the old man from up is mostly square but has a round nose, Wreck it Raplh is overly square but has rounded edges and a round jaw, Aku has almost no triangles in his head and is comprised of rectangles and circles, Batman has triangle eyes, but is mostly boxy with his jaw and shoulders, spiderman in the example is much more round than angular. The shape language bit completely missed the nuance for a dogmatic rule of shapes when it comes to character design. This entire video is kind of sloppy like that.

Character design is very subjective! That's so important to remember when designing.

"while red might feel dangerous and sexy" * Looks at Po from teletubbies *

"Triangles give off dangerous and edgy feelings" Phineas: MMMMMMMMMPH

4:13 I don't like that rework despite it has a more recognizable shape. It messes up the one important thing - the style changed a lot through the rework and it feels too different. The goal was to rework the shape, not to create a completely different character to match perfectly the "shapes" principle. Maybe the creator wanted to create something more diverse than a triangle tower

As an Eastern artist, I find Eastern and Western take different approach when it comes to animation. Eastern character design can be unanimous in body shapes(as you mentioned here), but they shine through exaggerated movement and animation. Western character designs are very shape oriented. So they have so many exciting wacky shapes, but when it comes to actual animation, they are really boring to look at with little exaggeration and depth to their movement. I think it boils down to how easier it is to figure out movements of a character that is unanimous or akin to average human body than super exaggerated stylized characters. Both do have their outliers tho. Like One Piece's exaggerated designs and Old Disney's magnificent and fluid animation.