I started searching on Pinterest for unisex/androgynous character design. Immediately I realised this wasn't an overly popular form of character design. I struggled to find any examples that didn't look either male or female dominated, and the ones that did look somewhat unisex I feel like it was harder to express their personality type in them.
This is an example I found from an artist on Twitter 'Vicki' (https://twitter.com/vickisigh)
I did like this example, and I felt it was one of the best representations of unisex design that I could find, and even so I feel like it has a heavier male influence.
I considered potentially making animal characters, as these would be genderless.
Here is an example by artist Anoosha Syed:
Although animal character illustration is genderless, and these illustrations are beautiful, the target audience for these would primarily be young children. My brand is aimed at young adults, and I wouldn't want to include avatars that don't belong with the brand identity.
Given how difficult it is to find good examples of unisex character design, I think I would like to leave this idea behind. I don't feel that it would be easy for me to express each character's personality if I am simultaneously trying to make them appear to be androgynous. I would like to make my primary target audience young women. My initial feeling of who would be more likely to engage with my concept was women. I think this could be due to the fact that women are more likely to believe with astrology (as evidenced by a survey carried out by YouGov in 2022), which was a huge inspiration to my concept. I would like to move forward with this target audience in mind.
If I were to continue this project following the masters, I might work on appealing to wider audiences, potentially including an option for users to choose which gender they wanted on their profile, and creating male versions of the colour characters. However, I would like to male the scope of this project more refined, so I can produce high quality work. Another potential next step following the completion of this project would be market research to measure responses of users, male and female. This would allow me to see if there was indeed an audience of male users for the brand before trying to appeal to this demographic.
References
Comments