Whilst working for DB Education I designed a character as part of the DB Primary learning manager product. The character was designed for the Key Stage 1 age group (4 to 11) and had to appeal to boys and girls and be robust enough to feature in both the interface and the branding.
Ideas
Working as apart of a focus I came up with a number of ideas to trial before moving towards the final ‘Robopup’ concept.
Focus group work
The focus group agreed that a familiar creature like a dog would appeal to the age group that the platform was designed for so I began working up concepts based around this.
Refining the concept
Once the initial concept was created I began to make refinements to the texture and shading in Adobe Illustrator.
Shading
I’d started off using simple black shapes with adjustments to the transparency to get areas of shading. I also worked on the eyes to give them more depth.
Highlights
In the initial concept I used gradients created in Photoshop to give highlights but I refined this with vector shapes and applied a gradient mesh.
Shading complete
Once the shading and highlighting was complete ‘Robopup’ had more depth and life.
Finishing touches
To help with presentation I animated ‘Robopup’ in Adobe Flash.
Please let me know below what you think of the finished character. Do you use a similar process? How would you improve the finished article?
The character looks really fine, I like the concept of having a dog as a representative mascot of the company. The art is looks really cool. I’m also fond of using adobe illustrator and I’d wish I’d also do great as much as you do. Well, I guess I’d better start sharpening my adobe illustrator skills so that I’d catch up to such creativity in the future.
I’ll bookmark this one. thanks 
Thanks very much Jessie. The character seems to have been well received by the children and the current design team at DB Primary have extended the family: http://demoprimary.dbprimary.com/service/util/login?path=/demoprimary&theme=Primary+KS1
[...] link Whilst working for DB Education I designed a character as part of the DB Primary learning manager product. The character was designed for the Key Stage 1 age group (4 to 11) and had to appeal to boys and girls and be robust enough to feature in both the interface and the branding. [...]