Character Designs: Colgate Characters

When 2A! started work on Colgate's educational video, we had a few different challenges we needed to tackle in pre-production. This project required a fresh new style that we needed to both translate pre-existing characters into as well as create new characters in.



First we needed to tackle the creation of a mother and daughter character for the piece. Above you can see the design sketches I started off with (on the left), then Joe's pass as he tweaked the designs in Flash (in the middle), and lastly a version with no ink line (on the right). From there we got client feedback and were asked to simplify the designs, making them a bit rougher around the edges to fit the "cut paper" style Colgate was looking for.



The other part of the challenge for this piece was taking two of Colgate's pre-existing characters, Dr. Rabbit and his assistant Dr. Brushwell, and translating them into the cut paper style. This posed the design issue of keeping true to the character's visual "essence" while making it feel fresh and new. Many drawings and comments later, we came out with the above finals which we feel work great.

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