The Template Design Process
Posted on August 31st 2021
So you probably have heard of the term 'template' somewhere around this blog. In the context of Avatary, a template refers to a creator category with a specific art style. We create our templates by hand with a lot of attention to detail, and we have the master plan to add new templates in a variety of styles every few months so that our Avatary Creator quickly becomes more and more versatile.
The start makes our launch template in a very cartoonish style, simply known as the Cartoon Template.
The Cartoon Template
The origin of our beloved launch template lies in a specific Rick and Morty drawing of Chris our head designer. The art style quickly evolved and was supplemented with various other famous cartoons we all grew up with, like The Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy or American Dad.
Taking the right inspiration is always a good start and with this in mind we want to bring you cartoon styles that you might find familiar, but still have our own little touch. It is very important for us that we create different and creative set of templates our community enjoys. Especially the toony art style is in our opinion one of the best ways to create simplified stylized avatars of yourself that almost always look great.
The production of these templates isn´t as easy as it seems at first glance, so in the following chapter we would like to give you a little overview about our template creation workflow.
How we create an Avatary asset
An Avatary Template consists of multiple different body parts, we just call 'assets', which can be categorized in various body groups, like eyes, nose, mouth, ears, etc. Every Avatary asset is a scalable vector graphic (SVG) which has the advantage that the image always looks sharp and clean no matter how high it is scaled.
We created a time-lapse video to show you how the design and the technical creation process of a body asset is made for our avatar creator. The inspiration of this wedding dress comes from the TV show Disenchantement.
The whole process, you have seen summarized in the video, took around three hours. As you have seen, the five key steps of every Avatary asset-creation are as following:
- 1) Sketching and inspiration gathering in Photoshop
- 2) Vector-Drawing in Adobe Illustrator
- 3) Cleaning Up position and color layers
- 4) Exporting as SVG
- 5) Implementing in Avatary
Upcoming Templates
In this last chapter, we want to give a short sneak peek about the future templates we have planned out so far. The image below shows three totally different styles that might be coming in the first year after the release of Avatary: The Popart Template, the Business Template and the Minecraft inspired Blockface Template.
It is important to say that none of these styles are carved in stone yet and that they might change over the creation process. Also, we want to give you the possibility to implement your ideas in the creation progress. We want to listen closely to our community and let them guide our directions. Based on your ideas, we will decide which template we will create and which will be coming next. Write us your ideas!
Feel free to check out our other blog posts down below, or follow us on our social media channels to stay always informed when we announce awesome new stuff:
