charative – generative mascot & avatar

What is Charative?

‘Charative’ is a mascot and avatar creator that is fully conceived through generative design. With social media platforms becoming an important medium where many brands are transitioning to, the opportunities and need for mascots have multiplied. Social media, as a whole, has now become a place where brands can personally interact and engage with consumers using their mascots. Through these mascots, brands can build brand trust, loyalty, association, awareness and can attract consumers who initially lacked interest the brand’s offering. Mascots can also increase the competitive advantages against competitors, enhancing the purchase intention of specific consumers.

However, while a good brand mascot empowers a company or organization to achieve its goals, a bad mascot creates negative perceptions, inflicting a bad impact. Bad mascots can often be faulted to a bad design or overall bad social media messaging. Self-development of a mascot is often the reason for bad designs as without proper research, these mascots can often be over-the-top caricatures that deters the intended audience. Thus, with many SMEs simply unable to hire a professional to design a mascot due to the time consumption and expensive process required, this design concept was developed to help these firms save both time and money.

‘Charative’ was also developed as a means for self-privacy on the internet. In most cases, using a personal image as one’s profile picture can open the user to many privacy concerns. Thus, having a generative avatar that is personalised and unique to each user can be an entertaining alternative to personal images or illustrations downloaded from the internet.

How does it work?

1. First opening the app, users are greeted with a welcome page that describes what ‘Charative’ is and how to operate the app. Clicking anywhere on the screen causes the welcome page to disappear, immediately entering into the main UI page.

2. On the left side, several traits can be seen to generate your personal avatar. Clicking on certain traits that matches the brand or user’s personality can change how each character looks. If the user wants to reset their traits, they can click the ‘reset button’ above.

3. After generating their avatar, users can fine-tune their creation with the arrow elements on the right. A randomised colourise button is also available to finish the avatar’s appearance.

When the user’s avatar is complete, they can click the save button to store a copy of their avatar on their computer, ready to be used for profile pictures and marketing materials.

see charative in action!