You can experiment with putting circular shapes in different parts of a character’s body, clothes, and hair to show the same warm feeling. Circles and ovals are mostly used for friendly and outgoing faces. You probably have seen some chubby faces and wondered: “Isn’t that cute?” Well, there’s a reason for that. How do geometric shapes affect the psychology of the characters? shape language Circle They are often symmetrical and structured shapes with sharp edges. Geometric shapes: these are all the shapes that you learned to draw as a kid like squares, rectangular, and circles.Abstract shapes: when you combine the two other types of shapes without any specific goal or structure, you got yourself an abstract shape.Organic shapes: think about all the free-flowing and non-symmetrical shapes in nature clouds, planets, earth, they’re all randomly formed and we call them organic.What are different types of shapes in design?īasically, there are 3 types of shapes that are usually used in the mainstream design: For example, the character “Anger” in Inside-Out is a rectangular type figure, which complements the short-tempered personality type of that character.īefore we talk about shapes in character design, let’s learn some basic universal ideas about shapes and how they are used in the design: (the text is derived from concept art tutorial) Here, we’re mostly talking about the psychological impact of different geometrical shapes that correspond to a specific feeling. What is shape psychology (Infographic)Īnother term for shape theory. What’s more, is that we often assign qualities to a person or a character in our subconscious only by perceiving them as a combination of shapes. That’s why we usually tend to draw the body first and then add more details with the face. (We have a complete and simple guide on using color for a character, you can check it out on the Color theory on the character design page.)Ĭolam also says Communicating a personality through body language ,and the silhouette is far more potent than only showing emotion through facial expression. Shape language, on the other hand, seems to have a universal meaning making it much more important for designers and brands. Some designers argue that color is more effective in conveying emotions however, you should know that color theory is pretty subjective and can be interpreted in different ways from culture to culture. When used in character design, shapes can tell a story, show personality, and illicit an emotional response in the viewer without using any words.ĭavid Colman, an Emmy winning character planner found in his studies that:īody language and overall posture of the character has more weight of emotion compared to facial expressions (eyes, eyebrows, lips and so on)
Shape Language is a concept used in art and 3D animation to communicate meaning based on shapes we are familiar with. Ok enough talking, let’s dive in! Understanding shape language in character design This way, you’ll have more knowledge when outsourcing your character design projects to a character design studio. By knowing some basic universal rules about shaping psychology, you will be able to tell a bad character from a good one. In this article, we briefly talk about different character shapes and how each of them can be used to communicate different emotions. A lot of marketing agencies and animation studios utilize the power of shape language to design well-structured characters that are key to brand awareness and lead generation.
#Character design infographic movie
Shape psychology is widely practiced in Disney and other famous animation studios, but the effect of shape is not confined to the movie industry. If you ever looked at a cartoon character and though they seemed confident but didn’t know why, you probably were not aware of the character’s shape language!
In 1946, Solomon Asch wrote a paper on how shape language and the physical aspects of a character affect the emotional aspect of a character:īody shape has a tremendous impact on the overall impression of the character.
0 kommentar(er)
