Faces From Everyday Objects:
Designing Robots By Neil Blevins Created On: Oct 29th 2025 Software: Any
When designing things like a robot, a monster, or an imaginary vehicle,
many designers get inspiration from the real world. This lesson will
show you some examples of how you can take everyday
objects and incorporate them into your designs, and then focus on
finding faces in objects to design robots with character.
Simple Robot Examples
When designing a giant robot for my book "The Story Of Inc", I took
inspiration from tribal art. One statue I had always found particularly
interesting is below, from the De Young Museum in San Francisco. I
loved the fact it had heads on all sides and 4 arms with swords, so it
could attack in any direction. This led directly to the first Guardian
in my book, I tweaked the
design and then made him bronze, like a vengeful idol ready for battle.
Another example, while in San Francisco, I spent way too
long stuck in traffic staring
at the brake lights on the back of the cars and trucks in front of me.
This flatbed truck ended up becoming the main eye area of a crab like
robot design I
made.
And the same technique is used in bigger projects too, including
blockbuster
films. Wall-e from Pixar was
originally inspired by a set of binoculars that the director had...
A Few Vehicle Examples
While this article is primarily about robots, nothing stopping the same
process to make vehicles like spaceships. They're good examples of
using an existing object as just a pure abstract shape.
Getting back to all those years stuck in traffic, here's the photo of
another brake light.
This led me to the shape of a spaceship I designed a few days later.
Here's a more popular example of using common shape for a design. The
letter
X inspired the shape and the name of Star Wars' X-wing fighter.
And why stick to just the english alphabet? Here's concept artist Sheng
Lam using Chinese characters to create spaceships.
In the same category, artist Eric Geusz became pretty well known on the
internet making spaceship illustrations of everyday objects...
Faces In Inanimate Objects
Back to robots, human beings are very good at finding patterns, it
helped us avoid getting
eaten by tigers hidden in the grass thousands of years ago. We can use
this fact to discover surprising designs in random patterns.
Here's a tile in my bathroom which I stare at quite a bit. After so
much staring, you're bound to see faces that aren't there...
Some faces in animate objects are more obvious. Here's a concerned
bathtub, eyes nose and mouth.
And here's a happy house...
A sneaky house...
And a house with a mustache and hat...
Below are 6 photographs of my own or from the internet that have faces.
As an exercise, try designing a robot based on your favorite.
Conclusion
So next time you need to design a robot and are stumped, try walking
around your environment and find objects that look like faces. Take
photographs and see how they can be transformed into designs. People
will think you're a design genius, but the real trick is just being
observant.
