What was your answer?

If you paired “Bouba” with the curvy shape and “Kiki” with the jagged shape, then you have the same answer as over 95% of the people across all ages, cultures, and languages.

This is a well-researched psychological effect called the Bouba/Kiki effect.

The Bouba/Kiki Effect—i.e., how the human brain attaches abstract meanings to visual shapes and speech sounds in a consistent way

The Bouba/Kiki Effect also applies to people’s names. A research done by Sidhu and Pexman showed that names with “round” consonants such as Molly were consistently paired with round silhouettes, and names with “sharp” consonants such as Kate with sharp silhouettes.

Here’s another interesting fact: this effect extends personality traits. People will link metaphorically “round” adjectives like easygoing with “round names”; and metaphorically “sharp” adjectives like determined with “sharp names.”

Examples of the exact images, names, and adjectives used in Sidhu and Pexman’s study.

Starting to sound familiar?

If you’re a brand identity designer, you’re likely skilled at pairing brand attribute keywords (like “passionate” or “sincere”) with visual elements that represent those words. You may often think of a brand as a person—what kind of values, personality, and look would they have? You’d then design an image that best represents this character that is a brand.

Let’s explore this further: if designing a brand is kind of like designing a character, then we might be able to improve our brand design by understanding actual character design.

Brand Design = Character Design

What is a character?

A character is essentially a group of abstract personality traits, beliefs, and motivations tied to a visual symbol that is their physical appearance — the same way attributes are tied to a brand.

Therefore, character design, like brand identity design, is a solution to the problem: how do we best express attributes through visual elements?

What makes a character well-designed?

Well-designed characters can tell us a lot about who they are by simply looking at them. Good character designers incorporate visual pattern language that helps us infer information about the character in a split second, similar to the Bouba/Kiki Effect.

Well-designed characters can be reduced to fundamental shapes (box, circle, and triangle), while still conveying a lot of personalities. Depending on the shape, particular characteristics are accentuated.