Bump
I really could use some advice here, need to email them back soon.

>>2403020
I assume this is just some private client shlub, not a business with a bit of dosh. The reality is you'd be doing the work for cheap money, the client isn't going to understand how much work it is. You can explain to them the process and all that goes into it but however much money they have to spend on this project is independant of all that. Can't get blood from a stone and all that.

You have two options:

1. Figure out how long it'd take you to do one of these designs (best guess) and charge a flat price per character based off an estimated hourly rate. (5 hours per character, 20 bucks an hour $100 ea. For example.) Quote them the price, say it's negotiable and be willing to walk away from the project if they say no or don't have the cash.

or

2. Understand the person you're working for probably doesn't have a lot of money and treat the whole project as a learning expearence that you get paid to do. (albeit not much) You give them an overview of the process, initial sketches based off a description, they chose one, limited amount of revisions, etc. Ask them what sort of budget they're working with and try to hammer out a price. Which of course will be slave wages. You'd be doing work anyway in lieu of this for yourself (for free) so why not do paid work that nets you some experience taking direction from a client and working for someone with a set of guidelines and a deadline on the work.

The one thing I'd say is don't get involved in some crazy huge project if you aren't the type of person that can walk away and be willing to screw someone. You don't want to get trapped working on some shit job that could be costing you study time to get better and get better work. Taking shit jobs is fine if they're quick but long project can fuck you.

>>2403169
I think the person has a pretty good budget to work off of, and fortunately it seems like the project is fairly small scale - they just want to put together a pitch book so they only need a few pages and from the sound of it probably want a couple of defining images of the main characters to show along with the pages. I think I'd better ask just how much of the designing I'd need to do or if they already have some established images, that way I can figure out how long it would take and price it based on that. Plus if I ask about that hopefully I'll get a better idea of how much work they're expecting me to put into it. Thanks anon, I was just about to give up on this thread.

While we're here, anyone have tips on designing interesting looking characters?

>>2403185
Glad that helped, I was surprised no one else had commented on this at all today. And yes, get is much info out of them as you can upfront. You don't want to start out the project thinking it's one and the client thinking another and it mutates into some crazy bullshit after you agree to work on it.

Also keep in mind that if the pitch were to work they may be contacting you for more work at which point it could turn into a large project, which is fine if you don't mind and they pay ok. This happen to me with some clients doing a kickstarter. The initial work wasn't much but then once it was funded they needed a ton of shit that tied me up for months for not that much cash.

Can't help much on the character design portion though. Not experienced enough to put any meaningful advise into words. Mostly all I can think of is sketch a lot, try tons of different ideas and try to have distinct shillouttets for the characters to make them easily identifiable.

>>2403212
Yeah we're supposed to have a phone conference later this week to go over things more so I'll try and ask all the pertinent questions. Thanks again for the advice, along with yours and another friend I put together an email that I feel at least good about and sent it. I probably under priced all these things but I really needed the work and I'm hoping it's going to have a fairly quick turnaround. It might be cool to get some long term work if his pitch goes well but I'm a little afraid now that you mention getting locked into such a low price. Guess I'll cross that bridge if and when I get to it..
I was kind of surprised too that nobody replied, usually people seem to love talking about character design. I probably should've used a more interesting pic.

>>2403185
Check out the the skillful huntsman, it pretty much lays out what you should do in terms of design process, working from silhouette first, then sectioning off the inside shapes, and then refinement to make your ideas work. Mind your basic design elements (small/medium/large shapes, focal areas, areas of detail, complexity hierarchy, etc), think graphically when you're doing this, something a lot of people tend to do is fill in their character with a bunch of shit and it just ends up reading as a bunch of visual noise. Triangle = fast/dangerous, square = solid/stable, circle = soft/friendly, things like that. And at the end of the day, much like designing everything else, use a shitton of reference and steal interesting shapes you feel like will make your character more memorable.

Beyond that a lot of advice really depends project to project in my opinion, like I was working on some silhouettes where I had to connect the allegiance between two characters, and a solution I came up with was to give them silhouettes with a lot of broken shapes as opposed to a singular solid block. Showing connections between characters through your silohuette designs is pretty crucial, but it could be as simple as putting capes on all the bad guys. You want to be able to tell who is who just with that, think character archetypes, like how you know Jafar from Aladdin is a bad guy simply because out of all the characters in the movie only he has triangle shapes. A good way to make your characters distinct is to emphasize a unique "quirk" they own that sets them apart from the rest of the cast (The Heavy in TF2 is tanky, so he has the biggest body, Scout is the fastest, so he has the smallest body).

But this is all assuming you're doing some legit work where they want to see your work in progress so they can direct it towards their own vision, if not, then I'd just go with sketching some ideas and throwing whatever you've got.

Apparently he needs the characters designed from the bottom up, he doesn't have any other sketches or anything of them anyway. I don't know whether I should bother going over the whole rights and royalties thing or just say fuck it and charge whatever rate per character and let it go. The guy does seem to have some connections but I don't know how far this thing will go. I doubt he'll end up making millions down the line that I'll get screwed out of but you never know. Maybe I won't factor it into the rate I charge but ask for some kind of agreement if he uses the designs beyond a certain profit margin.
>>2404441
Thanks for the advice anon. I had learned about all that briefly in an illustration class and I was thinking I wish I could like go back and get more info about it. I'll look into the skillful huntsman.