Designing from behaviour

A character becomes useful when silhouette, gesture and personality all point in the same direction.

Character design starts for me with behaviour. Before polish, I want to understand how a character stands, moves, reacts and occupies a frame. Silhouette, proportion and expression are not separate decisions; together they tell the audience who they are meeting.

For BMW’s Heart of Joy, the challenge was to design Okto, a fully CG octopus that could dance a waltz alone and still feel partnered. Pairs of arms had to echo one another, leading and following within the same body, so the performance read emotionally as well as mechanically.

The same principle holds when the drawing is deliberately rough, as it was on Disney’s Best Christmas Ever: clarity and character matter more than polish for its own sake.

Editorial direction

Behaviour gives a design something to perform.

• Finding character through gesture
• Silhouette, proportion and expression
• Why clarity matters more than polish

This is prototype scaffolding for the longer culture commentary.