[VISUALS PUZZLES] Characters, minimalist pop culture design

[Jybe]

Hi,

I’m a Swiss designer and I work since a few months on a pop culture project called “Characters”. Today, I wish to share the result here because I think it may interest you and all feedbacks will be useful for me.

The visual concept inherit from an old Lego Ad (http://goo.gl/jzhIfq). The idea is to represent famous characters with a stack of colored bricks.

I’ve created a web site where all the designs are sorted by themes (Cartoons, Comics, Cinema, Video games, etc.). If you click on an image, you can get a hint and the answer.

www.jybe.ch/characters


Everything is free. My wish today is to promote the project and build a community of pixelart / pop culture passionate around it.

I’ll be happy to read your feedback and try to make the project better.

Have fun!

Jybe

[Friend]

not sure how to critique this.  what do you think needs improvement?  though it is in jpg and has more colors than needed

[Gil]

The only thing I can comment on really is that you use a lot of French cultural references, while the site is in English. Not sure how many Anglo-Saxons know about Spirou, Babar or Mafalda, or even the word BD.

It's a thought-provoking experiment though, representing those iconic figures without horizontal information, just vertical.

Also, I'm not quite sure about the parts where you start breaking the rules by introducing changes on the horizontal, I think it deteriorates the message quite a bit.

[Jybe]

Thank you for the feedback Gil. It’s good points.

I’ll pay attention at the cultural references (my problem is that I don’t always know if a character is well-known in a specific culture).

I understand your concern about the horizontal rules I break. It’s complicated because if I don’t, lots of characters wouldn’t exist. My approach is to begin with straight rules and add some modifications to continue experimenting.

But I’ll think about it.
All the best!

[Gil]

All the best!

It's a very fun, thought-provoking experiment for sure, so all the best to you too

[Jybe]

Thank you

Another question. Do you think the difficulty is easy / hard / too hard ?

Because I'm thinking creating a quizz version on the website. But first I need to know how hard it is for people to guess the characters.

[Gil]

For me, the difficulty was just fine I think. That is, about 90% of the characters were pretty obvious, the other ones, I got it right by reading the first or second clue. The few I didn't get at all turned out to be characters I wasn't familiar with, but that was only very few of them (I'm from Belgium, so I got most of the BD stuff).

[Jybe]

OK. Thank you for the feedback Gil !