In order to generate some idea's for the character design of our "Fat Cat" I first brainstormed the idiom: "fat cat" and what it personally meant to me. I then researched online about it's meaning and true definition from sites such as:
My Brainstorm:
Both of these processes helped me gradually build up a character in my mind, the one element missing though was "fun". The brief highlights the importance of this word and I also believe it's a strong contributing factor when it comes to the probability that our Users are going to want to share and pass on our app. So in order to generate a character that represented a "fun fat cat" I decided to look into existing cartoon cats that have had a strong impact on the media industry and that tend to be recognized world wide. What's more, I think generating a sense of familiarity with our Users may encourage them to have a higher amount of interest in our app.
I decided to sketch out the characters that I looked at, simply because I find that I learn more about a character when I sketch it out as it teaches me to focus on individual parts in more depth.
These are my character studies:
After sketching these out I realized that visually I was probably imagining quite cliche attributes to add to my character in order to conform to the fat cat idiom. So I decided to also sketch out a few well known "fat cats". In order to find these I simply asked a few people who pops into their mind when I said "fat cat", the most frequent answers were these:
From all of my character analysis I was able to sketch out a few rough idea's of characters. I aimed to spend no more than a minute on each sketch so that I didn't get devoted to one character in particular. I then gathered some people's opinions on which character they liked the most. I didn't ask them a more complex question like: "which character do you think represents the ideology of a typical fat cat the most?" All I wanted to see was which character immediately jumped out at them, for Users are unpredictable and tend to get drawn to things that the designer is least expecting and I want a character that appeals without too much thought, because if there's anything that a typical User hates doing, it's thinking!
I got a fairly mixed reaction, the majority of responses leaned towards character "2" and "8" so I went from there to sketch out a few more. These ones I spent slightly more time on:
I then repeated the action of asking which character appealed to them the most and got a clear winner. The second cat got the votes and I was able to develop him even further:
The process was repeated for a final time and I decided it was time to go digital, with time pressing on the final character needed to be created and ready to merge with the rest of the groups work. I used Adobe Illustrator to create a character using the "inking technique". I've had a little experience with this in the past and I like the effect it has in character design so this seemed like the best technique for me.
After a few hours I managed to create a rough digital version of the fat cat character. I need to get some feedback on this and add some nice final touches but here he is:
We wanted the fat cat to have a little pet that he manipulates and who he shadows over. We liked this idea of using his pet to represent those in poverty as we want our message played through clearly in the entire length of the app. I played around with a few different "pets", but the goldfish seems to work the best as its trapped in a bowl and has nowhere to hide, it seems the most vulnerable.
After consulting people for feedback our idea has slightly changed. The fat cat representation is too cat-like and should instead represent a stereotypical "fat cat" for more effect. We've chosen to focus on Richard Branson so the character has been adapted to look like him. We have tried to focus more on the human characteristic and let the cat part take a back seat. This is the new character:
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