13 Tips for Illustrators to Design Highly Engaging Characters

Character designing is an exciting task. It looks fun and easy when you are taking a look from a distance, but when you actually try your hands on it, you realize how critical and intelligent the whole process is. There are people who become specialized only in this field because they require a strong mindset and consistency. If you are a designer or an illustrator who wants to develop a solid and engaging character, you may face some kinds of troubles and confusion at the initial stages. And that is why to make your task simpler, we have curated this list of 13 tips to design a highly engaging character. Designing a character is a huge responsibility, and the end results can have any level of impact on the objective. So, by keeping all the factors in mind, our experts have noted down these hints that you can consider as a helping hand for your character design.

1.  Decide The Character Element:

When you are starting with the character design first thing you have to decide is the core element of your character. A character design can be in the form of any element such as a human, animal, object, or any natural substance. You can study the market, trends, and your motive to get closer to your ideal character element. They each have their own area of function, and you get a different amount of area to implement your creativity. If you are creating for a specific brand, consider how that brand communicates with their audience, the industry, and their product categories. So, choose your element smartly, which can reflect the brand’s personality and create a high engagement with smart placement.

2.  Start With The Rough Lines:

As a designer or artist, you must be knowing that any idea first comes to in picture on paper and then on the screen. And this same applies to character designing also. So when you are just about to start designing your character, it’s advisable that you start with the basic structure and steps. If you are unsure about the design and do not have any clue where to start from, then it would be beneficial if you take a paper and pen and start with some basic geometrical shapes. Simply grab the pen and start with rough lines, make a very rough shape for your character, and keep doing that for a while. This can lead you towards your potential character design idea.

3.  Do Not Get Lazy With Sketches:

Here do not get lazy with sketches means try not to limit yourself with the experiments. When you are in the initial stage of character design, you should throw every idea on the paper. Whatever idea you have and how many different ideas you want to check, you should put them all on your paper. Even if you think you have found your ideal design, you should not leave any of your idea unturned. Various sketches and rough designs can help you practice better and come up with the best clever design. You can see how far your creativity can reach and what else you can create with your design. So experiment as much as you can for your character to get the best of your work.

4.  Understand The Core Purpose:

Your character design must have a contribution towards its purpose. Suppose a brand or person is giving you a responsibility to create a great engaging character. In that case, it’s your responsibility to not only deliver the best-looking and unique character but to give them a character that can fulfill their purpose with maximum engagement. The bond and remembrance that your character generates with the audience should create an impact on the respective brand’s purpose. According to the purpose, you have to make your character representing that brand or some particular objective so that it can benefit your client. Create a unique and attractive design but do not forget that a character must have roots in its core objective.

5.  Give Foundation To Your Character:

In order to create a strong character, you as a designer must have a clear understanding of your character. Try to create all the aspects of your character. Please give it a solid foundation and background to make it more natural and easy to connect with. You are your character’s creator, so you have to give it some back story and all the other necessary features that can add more dimensions to your character. Build your character with some factors like age, gender, positive traits, negative traits, dreams, likes, dislikes, and emotions. You can give any kind of background you want to your character but make it relevant and straightforward. Just with the necessary information to make your character more eye-catchy and engaging.

6.  Think About the Life Of Your Character:

It is a small suggestion that can help you to create your character design more securely and creatively. When you are designing your character with decided background and personality, try to include one more step. Try to give your character a past look and a future look. Especially when you are working for a brand, a future version of your character design can help a lot. If you are designing for some story, your pre-stored idea of its past and future looks can make your work easier and more thoughtful. You can give a starting and ending point to your character to indulge a more organizational approach. It is a helpful way for designers who are usually creating characters for various stories.

7.  Focus On The Personality:

The personality of your character is the core substance of your complete design. An engaging and exciting character should have a vibrant personality to attract and retain the audience. The end looks you want to give your character can only be achieved with a balanced focus on its personality as well. Your character’s personality is the fundamental element that decides many other elements. So after thinking about a basic character idea, the next thing you have to decide is its personality. You can have a combination of personalities as well but make sure you manage it nicely in your design. You can choose some core personality traits like funny, clumsy, pretty, mature, nerdy, friendly, aggressive, heroic, shy, etc., to build a final personality style. By this, you can design your character’s facial features, colors, objects, and many other essential designing aspects.

8. Accessorize Your Character:

People like to see some resemblance in fictional characters. To make your character fictional but natural simultaneously, you can add real accessories and objects to your design; whether your character is a human, animal, or some subject, you can always accessories it with some real and useful objects. This way can help you to make your character more attractive, memorable, and engaging as per your brand or purpose; you need to add appropriate accessories to your character design so that your end design has all the required elements to attend to the maximum audience. Giving them some useful objects to hold, some message to carry, or personality-enhancing accessories can defiantly work in your favor.

9. Wise Use Of Colors:

When it comes to selecting colors for your character design, there are many factors you have to consider. And the best way to get the right colors is through experiments. But if you want to follow a simple way to include only effective colors for your design, then there are few tips to do that. First of all, think about the contrast; if your character design has some other background element, try to add color contrast centering in your design. You should also not forget about the outlines as they do have importance in your design. Cheerful colors can never disappoint, so that you can use this rule as the safest way. Lastly, you can use gradient style as per your preferences to make your character modern and more appealing.

10. Think About The Designing Element:

Another essential but underrated aspect is designing elements that create the primary theme for your design. For instance, if you want to create a solid and masculine character, you can choose sharp-edged shapes with bold lines, or if you want to create a timid and friendly character, you can choose soft-edged and curvy shapes. If you want to follow a single pattern, use the same element creatively to create the whole shape. You can also use a combination of the different designing elements to finish up your character design, but it may require an intelligent and balanced concept. Whatever design element you want to choose, you have to make sure it is perfectly merging with the character’s personality. Do not use irrelevant or less relevant design elements for any purpose, and try to keep everything clean and aesthetically beautiful.

11. Do Not Forget To Get Inspiration:

During the whole designing cycle, you must be giving your best to design an engaging character. Your efforts and brainstorming can eat up a lot of your time. And regardless of creative ability and experience, it is always advisable to look for inspiration. At any stage of your work process, you can sneak out for some sort of inspiration around the world. This can change your whole game, and you can see the results in your designs. Inspiration from other designer’s work can help you stay updated as well with the latest trends and emerging concepts. You can use them in your designs and come up with some fabulous magical character designs.

12. Give Some Unique Essence To Your Character:

It is one of the crucial subjects that, as a designer, you must keep in mind. A great engaging character can be extremely attractive and attention holder, but a perfect engaging character should always be memorable. Your audience should not only give their attention, but they should also memorize it for a longer time. So try to make your character unique in some way than the others. Even if your character design is basic or standard, try to indulge some unique feature that can make your audience memorize it. You can do this with colors, expressions, out-of-the-box character elements, or with many other small details.

13. Always Create Different Versions:

Here, different versions are referred to as the same character and same design with different alternate styles. Once you are done with each element’s finalization, you can also create different versions of your character. You are allowed to go to any extent but keep the basic core character constant. When you have your character with you, only a few creative changes are required to create whole different versions. This can help you to see the mobility of your character for different purposes. Several versions of any character are always helpful for the designer and client as well. A single design of any character can leave a space of questions and confusion, so try to create more than one version of your character.

So that was our list. Above mentioned all tips are secrets of designers and artists around the world that we have tried to study and filter out for you. There is no predefined rule of art, so these are not a part of any process, but these tips are just small suggestions that you should follow on their respective steps to see their real influence and result on your character design. A character design can have multiple motives, and if you are keeping the engagement factor in mind, you must keep a balance between your end objective and the designing blueprint that you are following. It would help if you took advantage of the tips listed here to get a better understanding and widen your horizon of practicing designing.

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12 Best Search Engine Plugins for WordPress Websites

A good website is all about a good user experience. Developers and designers work together to build a robust website that provides an excellent user experience and best results. WordPress has many unique features that help you create a solid website, but it is a very prevalent fact that the default WordPress search feature is not one of them. WordPress search function has its own limitations, and it may not fulfill your requirement for your website. There are so many plugins available in the market which can change your whole website’s look and feel. Here, we discuss some of the best search engine plugins that you can use for your website to provide your visitors more than just a search bar. These twelve search engine plugins are designed to enhance your default WordPress search bar and improve your website performance by providing more relevant and constructive information. So let’s get into the details.

1.  Ajax Search Pro:

Ajax search pro is one of the best search engine plugins for websites. It has beautiful features and customizations to help you with your specific requirements. As its name suggests, this plugin’s prominent feature is its ability to add ajax live search to WordPress. It helps users to get better information and quick information. You should definitely replace your default WordPress search bar with the ajax search pro plugin to see the magical results and possibilities.

You get many valuable templates as well with this purchase to choose your style of displaying information. This well-documented and responsive plugin is perfectly compatible with page builders like Elementor, WPbakery, Divi page builder, etc. Multiple search bars, powerful filters, customization features, and excellent accuracy make this plugin a better-looking and better-performing search bar option for your website.

2.  SearchWP:

SearchWP is one of the well-known search engine plugins for WordPress websites. It is a professionally crafted plugin with multiple useful features for your visitors and your brand. Custom fields, also known as post meta, are entirely ignored in WordPress search, but with this plugin, you can make that variable data searchable to improve search activity on your website. You can also highlight the search query in search results like the Google search engine does.

With SearchWP, you get the search metrics extension that analyzes the search data, search traffic, what your visitors are searching for, and what not to so that you can get an on-site calculation for your website to keep it updated. This plugin is also compatible with many page builders like Elementor, Divi, Beaver, and others. SearchWP is a fantastic plugin due to its unique nature and functions, which can take your website to the next level for user experience.

3.  FacetWP:

If you have a website that includes tons of categories and listings, then this plugin is for you. You can introduce advanced filtering by adding faceted search functionality to your WordPress site. It allows users to find their desired result from a heavily loaded site, and they can filter their search results on various metrics predefined by the brand. This plugin is Ajax-based, so there is no reloading for users.

FacetWP can also give you outstanding results with SearchWP integration. This plugin is very lightweight and fast performing for heavy sites. It is developer-friendly as well while working perfectly with almost every theme type. There are lots of facet types like checkboxes, dropdowns, date ranges, sliders, pages, and proximity to fulfill different requirements. It is compatible with many widely used page builders like Elementor and Beaver builder. Overall an excellent plugin for eCommerce and multiple listings-oriented sites.

4.  Relevanssi:

Relavanssi is one of the popular search plugins for WordPress sites. It is a powerful plugin that works excellent as a replacement for the WordPress default search option. You get some unique and beneficial features that can increase your website performance and search metrics. This translation-ready plugin supports integration with various plugins like a2Member, WooCommerce, and more. You get two versions to use as free and premium for your website. This plugin provides relevant search results from the search terms and not the publish date.

You get deeper indexing with this plugin for all kinds of content like PDF, documents, ePub, and shortcode content. It has an automatic search completion feature, and you can add ‘did you mean’ features to give user-relevant suggestions as well. It allows you to set weight for titles, fuzzy matching, phrase searching and, tags, and comments. Relavanssi is undoubtedly a fantastic plugin with all the excellent required features for the search bar on a website.

5.  Reactive Search Pro:

Reactive search pro is very simple, fast, and easy to use for any website. You get unique and interesting features with this plugin that provides you unmatchable flexibility. This ultimate search builder has an advanced search, filter, and grid plugin powered by react-redux. And there is absolutely no complicated process to install this extendable WordPress search plugin. There is a lot more to explore and implement for you to get a tremendous change in user experience.

This plugin is compatible with WooCommerce, WPML, and Grid Builder for your convenience. You get 15+ search attributes like checkbox, map auto-complete, simple picker, image picker, color picker, text box, select box, and more. You can customize this plugin with easy drag and drop features to make it suitable for your site.

6.  Jetpack Search:

If you are looking for a fast, lightweight, and good search engine plugin for your website, then Jetpack search is the best option for you. There are some fantastic features in this plugin that can give your website a completely different influence. It is a very easy-to-use plugin for developers as well as visitors because all the functions and benefits are super straightforward to follow. Your visitors can get highly relevant information with instant search and filters without any reloading.

This plugin offers filtered and faceted relevant searches with modern algorithms. It also has real-time indexing so that your data can appear in search results within a minute of changes. One of this plugin’s key features is it shows the most relevant, boosted and prioritized results based on your site’s statistics. Jetpack is a great search engine plugin to enhance your website and replace the default WordPress search function.

7.  Ivory Search:

Ivory search plugin is the most favorable and affordable plugin with unique features to make your website better and user-friendly. It has a comfortable interface and easy to follow setup process with hundreds of options you can easily handle. One of the highlighted features of this plugin is you can create an unlimited number of search forms with their own unique settings. It also allows you to showcase your custom search on different parts of your website like header, footer, widget area, etc.

You get a surprising degree of control with this plugin regarding searching content. You can search for specific content through post titles, custom fields, metadata, taxonomy terms, and more. It also allows you to search data through its password protection status. Contrary, you can also easily exclude data based on specific criteria. This highly flexible and unique plugin is compatible with popular plugins like WooCommerce, Polylang, bb-Press, and others for your sake of convenience.

8.  Swiftype Site Search:

If you want to replace your default WordPress search feature with some polished, advanced, and better search feature, then Swiftype Site Search is a perfect choice for you. Highly comfortable plugin with no coding skill required to achieve the most relevant and customizable search result experience. You get a clean and straightforward dashboard that contains all the required features to customize this as per your need. Moreover, to provide extreme customization, this plugin also supports more than thirteen languages.

Swiftype plugin comes with pre-optimized typo tolerance, bigram matching, stemming, synonyms, phrase matching, and more to provide maximum relevance. There is an automatic updating facility to see the changes in content directly on your search results. You also get one bonus feature as search analytics to get the right insights about your users, content, and website. Overall, Switype is an excellent plugin to provide the best user experience and to maintain it as well.

9.  Ajax Search for WooCommerce:

It is one of the excellent plugins for adding a systematic search bar on your WooCommerce based website. This Ajax-powered search plugin makes your search results instant and accurate without any reloading. This plugin has a mobile-first approach to provide a special mobile search mode for a better user experience. There is no complicated process to embed this plugin into any website theme.

You can show product image, product price, product description, and SKU in live search results with this plugin. This ultra-fast search engine provides fuzzy search and conditional exclusion of products to ensure the best user experience. For any eCommerce site, the smart search bar is essential, which can offer suggestions, autocomplete terms, and excellent relevancy on every word and search sentence, and this plugin is most famous for that purpose only.

10. Better Search:

Better search is an advanced search plugin to replace your default wordpress search. With this plugin, you can offer more speedy and relevant content to your users. It is a translation-ready plugin and packed with some fantastic features to mold it according to your preferences. Users can search through posts, pages, and custom post types with this plugin. And it is a beautiful automatic plugin that offers seamless integration.

This plugin allows you to customize the output in many different ways, and you can also project your content by changing the weighting of post titles and post content. It offers results already sorted with relevance, and you can even display a list of popular search terms in the form of a heatmap with this plugin.

11.  Site Search 360:

Site search 360 is the most reliable and flexible search plugin to offer your site’s best user experience. It is fully responsive and customization friendly that offers excellent control over your search results. The installation process is straightforward to follow, and the interface is also clean and subtle to offer an intelligent search experience.

You can boost your certain pages and content and increase page views with smart controls, and with its analytics, you can understand your users and performance metrics. Overall it is a complete plugin with the best features and performance.

12.  SearchIQ:

SearchIQ is a great free plugin to replace the default WordPress search. You do not have to invest a huge amount of money and time in installing and using this. SearchIQ has all the advanced features with a fast mechanism to provide the most accurate information, be it on a small-scale website or a large and heavy website. With this plugin, you can customize the UI as well to make it more convenient.

You can manage the search results to boost your intended data, and it comes with in-built AI to handle typos, synonyms, and fuzzy matches. With this plugin, you get real-time analytics to get an overview of your user’s search pattern and your website’s delivery.

Websites without a search bar option not only affect your user experience but also affects your website’s performance from an SEO perspective. If you are building a heavy website with a number of pages and data, then the solid search bar’s feature becomes mandatory for your site. If a user is not getting his required information within a short time, then he may shift to another site. And this can increase your bounce rate and directly affect your rank on search engine pages. Using a solid search engine plugin can make your website more effective and easy to use rather than using the default WordPress search function. Whether you are building an eCommerce site or blogging site, search engine plugins as mentioned above can assure you the best ways of showcasing your data with optimum user experience.

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11 Tips for Designing a Perfect Mascot

Mascots are known as the symbol of luck, and they started gaining popularity in the business world around the late ’90s. Nowadays, you can remember a number of famous brands by their mascot design because it is a part of marketing strategy and one of the most vital elements which take the huge responsibility of brand image. As per your business and target audience, you need to create a character that plays the role of an essential bridge between your brand and audience, through which your customers can get easily associated with your company. A mascot can have many different purposes, and as per the brand and its objective designer needs to work accordingly. It is a very critical process that requires in-depth knowledge about the market, company, trend, and audience behavior.

Here, to give you some advantage in your process, our experts have explained 11 tips for designing a perfect mascot. With these tips and efficient creativity, you can surely develop an amazingly unique mascot that helps your brand fulfill the marketing purpose.

1. Purpose Of Your Mascot:

When you are designing a mascot character for your brand, the first thing you need to consider is the purpose of that character for your brand. You can not go generic about this because it is the fundamental aspect of your whole mascot design. To clarify the purpose, you need to find answers to questions like why your brand needs a mascot? Where you want to use this mascot? And how you want to use this mascot? Once you get the clarity about your mascot’s sole purpose, it becomes easier for you to start with. You can get the required elements and remove the unnecessary clutter from your design. Your vision for your design and the organization’s vision about the end-use should be on the same page to get the expected mascot design within calculated time and energy.

2. Do Not Start Without Strong Research:

A mascot design has a vital purpose and massive impact on a brand image. So, you can not start on the foundation of half data or basic research when you are designing one. You need to have all the facts and data clear on your mind. Two things that require deep research for a perfect mascot are research about the audience and research about the brand’s marketing scenario. Your mascot is going to become the face of your brand, so that is the primary communicator of your brand. Eventually, your customers would get associated with your mascot character in a big way. So you must get into your customer’s shoes and understand their behavior and perspective about your product and market.

If you want to create a perfect mascot that builds an effective bond with your customer, you should know your customers’ emotional, psychological, and behavioral patterns. Mascot design is not a design that you can deliver on a shallow base of information; it does require a solid, reliable foundation of research.

3.  Type Of Your Mascot Character:

Another important thing you need to decide is the type of your mascot character. There are primarily three types of characters- a human character, an animal character, and an object character. As per your product and purpose, you have to decide what can represent your brand in the most promising manner. If you want to present yourself as a person, then going for the human character is the best choice. Suppose your product or service can get associated with some animal, or you want to showcase it passively with some animal’s nature. In that case, selecting an animal character can surely fulfill the purpose. Or suppose if your product or service is having a direct relationship with some object, then select an object as a character and keep your mascot straightforward and easy to understand.

4.  Unique Features:

The best tip to create a perfect mascot is the focus on the small details of your character. You can see unforgettable human and animal characters in your industry from the top brands. So when you want to design for your brand, you must focus on your character’s small features, which can make your mascot design unique from others. The facial characteristics, expressions, type of graphic, size, area, extra props, and many small features complete your mascot design and differentiate it from the competitors. Your mascot design is way complicated than just a cartoon character.

The appearance, personality, expressions, and connectivity that your mascot character carries have a straight and direct correlation to your brand image. So, make sure the features you include to make your mascot unique must be concerning your product and brand image.

5. Pick Colors Smartly:

The next thing about your mascot design is the colors of your character. As a designer, you must be knowing the importance and meaning of colors in designing. Most color schemes are derived from past trends, and they are effective as well, but you can experiment and come up with something exciting for your design. You can study market trends and common scenarios where you can find some unique options for your design. In the color scheme, you have to decide whether you want to keep plain colors or gradient colors, whether you want to have outlines or not and whether you want to make it in 3D or not. Based on these factors, you can easily decide the colors for your mascot design which can complement your brand image and establish the desired position in your customer’s mind.

6. Take Help Of Sketching And Animation:

To improve your mascot design or get a better perspective for your design, you can take the help of sketching and animation. The sketching process is a part of an old technique that helps you develop a character more meticulously. And animation gives you a realistic image of your character and its movements. Both processes can provide complete guidance of mascot design and its every little detail. You can see what is practically possible in your design and what can make your design better. You can also get to see how your design can look in the end from all angles and on all platforms. Sketching is a process that you perform before designing on software, and animation is what you do after designing a mascot. These are extra exercises that help you get an assurance of your design to benefit your brand image.

7.  Decide The Personality:

The personality of your mascot character is an essential subject. No matter how good a designing blueprint is and how well designing elements you are using, if your character’s personality is not suitable for your brand and message, you may have to face results another way around. A character’s personality is an amalgamation of various critical factors like the costume, overall look, skin color, hairstyle, accessories, expressions, facial features, colors, strokes, posture, and font style.

According to your brand and product, you can decide the personality of your character. If you want to connect with your audience on a more emotional ground than your character must be friendly, simple, easy to approach, and positive. If you want to showcase your brand’s dominance, then your mascot must have strong lines, bold colors, sincere facial expressions, and subtle design.

8. Focus On The Brand Persona:

When you are working on a mascot design, you are more likely to get involved in that character’s design. But at any stage, you can not forget that you are not building a character, but you are building an element that has the core purpose of presenting a brand. So, that character design should emerge around a brand and brand personality. Everything that you choose should have some roots in your brand’s image. Your mascot design should have your brand’s personality, which is easy to remember and easy to connect with. The perfect mascot design has a character that is clean to understand easy to memorize. In the end, your character should represent your brand image with a transparent message and without any unnecessary elements.

9. Build the Connectivity and Involvement:

When you are done with your mascot design, you can see how marketing professionals decide to use it in various manners. A mascot character may have to serve many different platforms and areas according to the business strategy. So, in the end, that character needs to draw the audience’s desired involvement and response. It is a designer’s responsibility to design that mascot in a very engaging way. After deciding all the significant elements, you have to place them in a design smartly and creatively to deliver the most engaging and lively character. The kind of personality, expression, gestures, and message delivery you give your mascot design plays a vital role in the front end. If you know, the mascot characters of food chains are always amusing, friendly, and relatable, and the mascot designs of technological brands are generally unique and sophisticated. Still, they all have engaging factors in a common thread.

10. Make It Simple but Unique:

Designing a mascot can involve many different criteria and predefined rules. You may have to deal with a number of constraints while designing a perfect mascot. Mistakes in a mascot design can make you and your brand suffer through serious issues. So if you want to avoid mistakes and don’t want to take any risk, going for basic and classic mascot designs is not a bad idea. But you have to understand that it should be a completely unique design for your brand. You have to make it simple and clean so that it engages with a maximum audience, but at the same time, you want your audience to remember your mascot. Hence, you have to add some unique features to your design to make your mascot stand out and capture maximum attention.

11. Consider the Mobility:

If you know there is a possibility of presenting your mascot character in a live location, then you must consider some essential factors. If your brand decides to use that mascot in any other form, then your design should be able to adapt and perform flawlessly. For instance, if you have a vision of a dancing mascot or want your mascot character to hold things and move around, then your mascot’s personality and get-up should have that mobility implanted. Mascot characters can go on different devices, different mediums, and different locations, so you have to keep in mind every possible flexibility required for your design. It would be best if you considered the mobility and vision factors while designing a perfect mascot. It should have a comfortable costume, scalable file, appropriate size, and practical elements so that your mascot can perform equally on every form.

On print ads, logos, television ads, real locations, and on many other platforms, you can see the wise use of mascot by the brands. Suppose your service or product is falling into a general category. In that case, it may be easier for you to design a mascot than brands falling into a specific category of service and product. A failed mascot design can sabotage your whole branding strategies, but a successful mascot design can boost your marketing performance in a single shot. It is not a necessary element, and not every brand use this. But if you plan to go for it, then you do require an expert team to make the core designing process persuasive. Above mentioned tips is the essence of market experts that can help you work on the right path for your mascot design. So, make sure you take advantage of it and deliver the most competent mascot.

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