Abstract
Design is naturally embedded within our intuition. It gives the subject a functional and aesthetic value. This is where culture comes in and pulls design to another level. Designs that contain cultural value tend to achieve deeper expression and originality. In addition, globalization has brought several cultures together resulting in cross-cultural environments, which occur to character design field as well. Cultural characters often appear on exported products (as a promotional character or mascot) and films as seen within late feature animations. Eventually, mixed cultural characters were introduced. Many new characters were created with at least a combination of western and Asian culture to rhyme with world’s diversity movement. Nonetheless, the exploration of mixed cultural character design is limited. Guidance and process for cross-cultural character design are still vague. This study aimed to examine the visual factors of character design that stimulate cultural sense through the perception of beholders. The results led us to the proposal of an original visual design guide for cross-cultural characters to achieve beholder interpretation goal. This was initiated by examining the influential weight of visible character components from cross-cultural designs between Thai and Japanese culture. The findings show that costume is the key parameter to affect a character’s cultural sense for beholders following by character type, color, and texture respectively. Their influential weights were subsequently measured into percentages for design blending foundation. Furthermore, beholder’s preferences of cultural character design are highly influenced by nationality
https://ror.org/04cd75h10 
