Designing Characters is an activity traditionally related to comics, cartoons and old TV comertials that is going to become very important as the Web becomes a platform for Timebased and Interactive story-telling.

Characters are directly related to Marketing, in fact you subconsciously approach a collective by creating a character that they can simpatize, aim to or feel identify with.

Because of the heavy psychological charge that characters have to carry, they are usually complemented with props, clothing or style variations and Branding elements.
Those are characters created for Teen Magazine online 2001 by Adrianne de Loia.

They were all created with Adobe Illustrator, then composited with background and type in Photoshop and re-structured as Flash symbols to save file-size, then animated and organized as interactive sections in Adobe Flash.
Below you can see the Interactive pilot created to promote those characters.

You need to click on each section to see the content. Don't forget to click on Music and the Beat.
The flash file is 188k big. Every possible piece was created as a symbol.