Designs for characters to illustrate peer education activity workbooks for Girlguiding
A great brief, to design characters that are as fully-rounded individuals as possible, yet without explicitly dictating ethnicity; these are cyphers for all the girls that make up the amazing spectrum of Girlguiding's membership.
We also wanted to make the characters relatable to the broad age range that peer education users and trainers comprise, which is 7-24 years-old; I think we achieved that.
Each of the characters' age and attitudes are specific to the activity that they help to illustrate - so out of context you may wonder why one character has an aspect that others don't. Often, the same character is used to express one idea, such as the impact of body language on saying "No". I suggested using brand colours throughout for skin tones to both acknowledge and unmark ethnicity, with the simplest shapes to mark and celebrate diverse body shapes and their age.
t's incredibly fun to design each character's hair and clothes, playing with the brand colour and tint combinations. That, plus the variety of shapes required for hair and apparel (the heads, arms, and legs are more or less uniform across every character) mean that Adobe Illustrator is the only tool for this job.
Being vector lines and shapes, they're also ripe for animation - and I'd love to collaborate with someone on this!
