I want you to close your eyes and take a mental voyage. Transcend this reality and imagine yourself in a parallel continuum where the Monopoly man has a monocle; where it’s Berenstein Bears, not Berenstain Bears; where Nelson Mandela died in prison; and where SpongeBob isn’t a square.
It’s not right, is it? That’s what I think, at least. Sure, SpongeBob could be a cylinder, and for all we know, it’d make no difference, but his status as an icon aside, there are qualities that seem to marry him to the shape of a square: he’s dorky, he’s awkward, he’s unbelievably corny—he really is, dated as the slang may be, a square.
Many aspects of character design are subjective, but that doesn’t save me from talking out of my ass. Design is a series of decisions influenced by tenets of psychology, mathematics, and culture. A character’s appearance isn’t totally up to interpretation. The only people who know exactly what went into a design are the designers, and to my surprise and chagrin, there’s not a ton of documentation on SpongeBob’s visual development.
With that said, what better source is there than SpongeBob’s late creator and god, Stephen Hillenburg? Of the various bootlegged sound bites I sorted through, the most in-depth peek I could find at Hillenburg’s thought process is in this video, where he describes deciding on the perfect sea creature to represent “an innocent—sort of like a Jerry Lewis under the sea.” While sketching sea sponges, Hillenburg thought of a common sink sponge—the square kind—and “immediately locked on to the idea of this undersea nerd.” You’ll notice similar language in this excerpt, in which Hillenburg explains wanting to make a show about a character who’s “innocent, well-meaning, and kind of an oddball.”
It’s an interesting take, because, thinking purely in terms of shape, a square doesn’t typically connote qualities like innocence, youth, and spontaneity. In his book, Creative Character Design, Bryan Tillman, who has both lectured and worked in game art, attributes to the square qualities like conformity, masculinity, and order. Hmm. That doesn’t sound like SpongeBob at all.
So what gives? I think SpongeBob demonstrates just how complex and flexible the character design schema is. It goes without saying that a character isn’t as simple as his or her shape. Color is one of several factors that affect the message a design communicates. One study conducted at the University of Georgia found that yellow—which, need I remind you, is the color of SpongeBob’s…skin?—is “generally seen to be lively and energetic”; that it’s effective in evoking positive emotions. So it follows that the official “SpongeBob Yellow,” joint brainchild of Nickelodeon and Pantone, a commercial printing company, is defined in disproportionately elegant prose as “a luminous golden hue that reflects the energy of the sun, radiating joy and happiness, and sparking imagination.” Well, damn.
“SpongeBob Yellow” applies an energetic twist to the most static shape: a juxtaposition that bleeds into the supporting elements of the titular fry cook’s design. Robert Ryan Cory, a character designer on SpongeBob Squarepants for almost 10 years, published a handful of lecture slides (language warning) detailing the mechanics of visual algorithms in concept art. Cory presents SpongeBob as a compromise between geometric and organic design, which, for a character, can contribute to an “awkward/funny/naïve” mien. Most of SpongeBob’s components are symmetrical and boil down to basic shapes: from his eyes, to his teeth, to his eyelashes, to his fit. Binding them to the form of a wavy box covered in an uneven amount of uneven craters, however, introduces a welcome amount of disorder that makes up a pineapple-dweller who’s perfectly off-kilter.
All this to show that SpongeBob is more than his square pants. A character borne of a union between the world’s most boring shape and the ocean’s most boring organism remains an icon of the unorthodox, and of boundless imagination. I’m starting to sound like Pantone here. At the end of the day, whatever connotations I ascribe to SpongeBob are just that: ascribed, imposed from without. I can chalk it up to mathetmati-mical, psychologi-mical, hoity toity mumbo-jumbo, but I can’t speak for the designer, and I can’t speak for you. Maybe you look at SpongeBob and you’re overcome with mortal terror. Maybe he reminds you of your dad. I don’t know. That’s the beauty and the crux of design: it can do almost anything for almost anyone.
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