Which one should we make first?
Four fruit, one first production run. I had an opinion, and then I talked myself out of it.
The renders are done, and there are four of them: blueberry, watermelon, strawberry, orange. The first production run is one of them.
Minimum order quantities being what they are, this isn't a case of making a few of each and seeing what happens. It's one character, several hundred units, and about four months before I find out whether it was the right call.
Where I've landed, tentatively
Watermelon. Which is not where I expected to land, and I want to show my working because the reasoning changed halfway through.
The test I kept applying was not "which is the nicest picture". It was:
Which of these can sit on a made bed, in a room belonging to an adult, next to a lamp and a book, and look like it belongs there?
By that test, blueberry wins comfortably. It's the deepest and least sweet of the four — in a dim room it reads as a dark blue object rather than as fruit, and it's the one I'd personally own.
What changed it
Two things, neither of them aesthetic.
The thumbnail. A duller colour is a harder first impression, and that matters enormously for a crowdfunding campaign where you have about two seconds in someone's feed. Watermelon is unambiguously the better thumbnail. Green rind, red flesh, black seeds — it reads at forty pixels, and nothing else in the set does.
The spec sheet. This is the unromantic one. Watermelon is the character I've actually finished drawing up properly — four views, dimensions, colours, wing construction, the lot. It's sitting with a supplier right now. The other three are renders and a feeling. Choosing blueberry means spending another few weeks producing the same document again before anyone can quote me for anything.
I don't love making a design decision on the grounds of which drawing I finished first. But "the one we can actually sample this quarter" turns out to be a real argument, and pretending otherwise would be a nicer story than a better decision.
If you have a view, reply to this email — they come straight to me. Blueberry is very much still on the list; it just isn't first.