Attention! This is Sergeant SME or Sgt Sme (SME is an industry acronym for “subject matter expert”). He's a character I've created working with We Are Epic, the design, PR and marketing communications company based in Leicester. Nexus Defence was the client and they provide specialist security equipment and consultancy within the counter terrorist arena. Quite a serious topic!
The brief was to create a character that was 'quite anonymous'. This made the project a little trickier than normal as the brief totally goes against the usual reason for creating a character. When a character design project lands on my desk it usually requires a special, unique and stand-out character, quite the opposite to anonymous I think you'll agree :)
The service Sgt SME is promoting is a fairly serious one, so after some initial sketches (see below) it was decided to steer clear of anything too cartoony. We quickly decided to advance one of the sketches and create a simplistic vector version (see below) of the soldier in full kit holding a detector. We tried a few variations on the uniform and also tried adding some background colour, but finally decided on the colours you see on the big Sarge below.
As usual let me know what you think. Anonymous enough do you think? Cheers and enjoy!