Three Roles I Want to Try in the Future
In my futrure career, the roles I am most interested in are character design, background design, and character animation.
All these roles are closely connected to storytelling, visual style.
And they are also the parts of the creative process where I feel most related and where I get the strongest feeling of achievement.
Character Design
A character designer needs to create clear and unique characters based on the story and the concept of the project. The characters must show personality, visual shape, and the basic emotional mood of the story.
Character design is not only about making characters look good but also about creating a character that can carry the story.
I learned a lot from inmotion. Alex Hirsch gave a talk there. After the talk, I asked him how he created amazing characters like Bill Cipher and Grunkle Stan. He said that a good character should be recognizable at one glance, and every design choice we made should support the storytelling. This made me understand that character design is not only about cool style, but also about creating someone who feels alive.
It’s a shame that I wanted to ask more questions, but there were too many people waiting in line.
This year, the Tim Burton exhibition at the Design Museum also had a strong impact on me. His characters (like corpse bride and Jack from Nightmare Before Christmas) have bold shapes, strong silhouettes, and clear emotional themes. Every design is deeply tied to personality and the tone of the story (most of them are creepy in a good way tho). It shows how powerful and strong character design can be when the style and narrative fully match.
Background Design
Background designers set the stsges where the story happens. Their works help the audience understand the world and the atmosphere around the character.
Because of my architecture background, I have a solid foundation in spatial structure. I often think about how space and background affect emotions.
This makes background design feel very natural to me, and I enjoy the combination of logic and imagination in this role.
Character Animation
I interviewed an animator friend from Tongren Culture online. She shared that character animators bring the characters to life through movement, timing, and performance. Animation is not just moving drawings, but acting.
And that connects directly to my own practice. In several of my projects this year, I worked on character performance through rough animation, key poses, in-betweens, and lip sync adjustments. I realized that the core of animation is communicating emotion.
This role matches my experience strongly and helped me understand the importance of timing and clarity in acting.
Unfortunately, she also mentioned that her income level was rather low. And at her request, I have blurred her income. Another friend of mine worked in Shanghai, designing mascots and creating animations for the esports team BLG. Sadly, she got fired during the industry wide layoffs.
According to a 2024 China 2D Animation Industry Survey Report, the average monthly salary for artists from directors to animators is approximately 6,000 RMB. And apparently that is not an ideal income. Plus, the average daily working hours are like crazy.
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