On my website, I am planning on having in depth descriptions of each personality type on the home page. For this, I have been considering designing some avatars to represent each colour character.
To do this, I started by looking at flat illustration. In a lot of the website examples I looked at, there were illustrations on the pages that I felt enhanced the overall appearance of the website, and the majority of these illustrations were in the flat illustration style. I don't have a lot of experience in this area, so to start this design process I decided to first look at some tutorial for flat character design.
I found a couple of useful tutorials by YouTuber Cosmin Serban:
Following these tutorials, I designed these flat character illustrations:
I was really pleased with how these two illustrations turned out. I had never tried designing in this style before and had assumed I would 't be able to do it because I'm not the best at drawing. However, just from following a couple of tutorials, I feel confident that I understand the technique required for flat illustration as a beginner. I think with more practice I will be able to design an avatar in this style for each colour character.
For these characters, I had some things I needed to consider. Firstly, I wanted to consider ethnic diversity. I knew that designing all the avatars as white, for example, would not be inclusive for all ethnicities. However, if I were to include avatars of a range of diversities and assign them to a specific colour character each, it would make it more difficult for people to resonate with their colour character if they didn't match their ethnicity. For example, if someone of an Asian ethnicity took the test and the avatar representing their colour character was Latino, it would make it difficult for them to envision themselves as that character.
After looking at some examples of flat character illustration, it stuck out to me that a lot them used unconventional colours as skin tones anyway. This immediately made me feel more confident in my ability to promote inclusivity, as using purple for the purple character's skin tone, for example, would not be isolating to any ethnicity.
After designing these flat characters, it also occurred to me that there could be an issue with gender identity with these avatars. On the 16Personalities website, after a user takes the test it asks them if they wish to have a male or female avatar, and they have designed an avatar for each. This could be seen as insensitive to those who identify and non binary, for example. I had considered doing the same for my project, but I think I would prefer to avoid this issue. I think it could be a good idea to look into how to design androgynous illustrations. I feel that the illustrations I have created above could actually be perceived as male or female as they are pretty abstract.
Also, I think thus far, I have imagined my target audience as being more female oriented than male oriented. When I have spoken to my peers about my project, I have found that females appear to have a stronger understanding and interest in it than males. I also think that the design ideas I have for the project, as well as the colour character development mood boards I have created, are much more female influenced. I have considered doing some market research to find out more about this, but as it stands, I feel more strongly that females will be my primary target audience. Therefore, it could make sense to design female avatars. However, I do want to look into androgynous design first and see if this is a possible route.
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