earlier i was having a conversation with a friend over Instagram when they asked me how i design characters & what i generally think makes good character design. since I’ve been asked this question before by other artists I thought it would be helpful to repeat what i said here.

generally speaking, my only true goal i have when designing characters is to have some sort of appeal to them. I usually do this through what the audience/viewers/fans interpret as “cuteness”, mostly because when it comes down to it- cute things look nice. It’s simple.

Big eyes, round features, disproportion, etc etc are some of the factors that go into it. with that said though, you can’t have it be too cute, or else it’ll just look bland and in some cases too ugly.

i.e. one artist that absolutely excelled at this was Chuck Jones. Tom and Jerry were always sorta cute, but the way jones drew them made these characters appear more appealing & exaggerated than usual, which i believe gave them an added layer of personality based on visuals alone

however, another really important factor that truthfully, a lot artists tend to miss, is detail. or, at at least a balance between simplicity and detail. too much detail, and a cartoon looks ugly. too much simplicity, and it looks bland. It’s always good to find a balance.

a thin layer of cuteness helps mask things that would usually be considered average or ugly, and therein give it appeal.

take knees for example. usually in cartoons knees are either drawn real grotesquely or not at all, which is (partially) why I do those really weird knees on cute girls. It’s a balance of what would considered a really grotesque detail slapped on something really cute (aka girls).

regardless, no matter what the style or type of cartoon, the audience generally likes things that look “appealing” and can actually make or break whether or not the audience likes the style of a cartoon. It’s really simple, actually.

hopefully this helps. now granted, what I’m saying isn’t objective, but rather just stuff I’ve learned from studying other cartoons/cartoonists. chao :^)