Yesterday, I fell in love with Darcel, the creation of Craig Redman.

Thanks to Slavin, I was at a Pictoplasma event—where the topic is what makes great character design. Lars and Peter are the two geniuses behind Pictoplasma and they emphasized the importance of simplicity in characters. Why? Because it allows people to project their own resonances onto the character. It’s why overly anthropomorphic things are so creepy—they’re so close to being like a person, but they just aren’t.

At the same time that simple characters are better, they need to have personality. It’s the very small details that makes them real. Darcel is a perfect example of this. The same holds true in all kinds of design. My difficulty with this is that I’m currently thinking of how to programmatically generate characters—how do you do that and achieve the right level of detail without creating all kinds of ugly, little Frankensteins?