Soulburn Studios Art Lessons

Visual Hook: Fighting Mech Analysis
By Neil Blevins
Created On: Jan 28th 2022
Updated On: Dec 5th 2024
Software: None

As a designer, it's important to use visual hooks, which are a set of rules that define a unique look, a look that makes your design stand out from the rest of the crowd. For a junior designer, this may be applied to a single design, or as a more senior designer, a visual hook may be something that needs to be applied to an entire alien race, or even an entire IP or Franchise. This lesson will illustrate what a visual hook is, and how important it is. And to prove the point, I'll be analyzing the visual hooks from 19 of my favorite fighting mech franchises.

You have two choices with this lesson, watch me discuss the issue in the video below, or read the full text.

Examples Of Visual Hooks

So lets start simple, a visual hook for a single design. Let's say you're making a character, and that character has a ridiculously huge sword, that can be the visual hook for that character.

If someone asks "what does this character look like", the other person would say "He's the guy with the giant sword", and now you know you've done your job as a designer, because the audience can easily identify that character from the other characters in a single sentence. And hopefully that visual hook can also say something about the role or personality of that character, but that's a topic for a different time.

If working on an environment, a visual hook could be an architecture theme. For example, all of the pieces of a building have triangular shapes. Or the visual hook could be a material, like everything is made with white marble with black marble accents. Think of Star Wars, Tatooine's main visual hook is it's a desert planet. Hoth's main visual hook is it's a snow planet.

Now let's get more complex, and define an entire group or alien species with a visual hook. The simplest is something like "all the bad guys wear black". Or "all the bad guys shoot red lasers". In the videogame Destiny, there are a number of alien species you deal with, the Cabal, the Fallen, the Hive, and the Vex. Each of these species have their own set of visual hooks that make it easy to tell one from the other. The Cabal are like rhinos, everything is fat and bulky. The Fallen are skinny and frequently have 4 arms. The Hive are white, skeleton zombies. The Vex are covered with golden metallic armor, have a single glowing eye, and have big fan heads.

So even though each alien race may have 5 or 6 different types of combatants, each with their own flavor, you can always tell any member of the Vex because they all share the same visual hook.

A visual hook can also happen at the IP level. While different races and planets in Star Wars have distinct looks, all of the stuff in Star Wars have common visual hooks. Like all of the spacecraft show wear and damage, and follow a similar philosophy of paneling and greebling. All lasers coming from weapons have a similar look. In this case, there are even audio hooks, like all lasers have a similar sound when firing. That sound really helps define Star Wars from other space operas.

When dealing with a larger group of things, such as an entire alien species or universe, Visual Hooks can sometimes also be called a Visual Design Pillar.

Visual Hook vs Visual Design Pillar

Some people use these two terms interchangeably, and that's ok. For me, I usually use the term Visual Hook when dealing with an individual or small group. And I usually use Visual Design Pillar when refering to a larger group like a species, project or entire universe.

So if we follow that pattern, in our previous example, the character with the sword would be a hook, the environments would have a hook, but the destiny species might be more of a pillar, and the starwars spaceships might be a pillar.

For simplicity, we will refer to everything as "Visual Hooks" for the remainder of this tutorial, but feel free to use the two terms in whatever way you'd prefer.

Giant Mechs

So now lets get into the meat of the discussion. We've had giant fighting mech IPs around for 50 years, appearing on TV, films, videogames, books and comics. Stuff like Battletech, Macross, Gundam, and Mazinger. Most of these IPs have distinctive visual hooks to help them stand out from other similar franchises, so I'm going to go through a number of examples, point out their visual hooks, and in doing so, it may inspire you when it comes time to give your own projects a distinctive visual hook.

Transformers

The first series of Transformers toys borrowed heavily from pre-existing toylines in Japan, so it wasn't really until the second series that the unified transformers visual hooks became common. But here are a number of attributes that the Transformers shared...

They tend to have strong saturated colors.
They tend to have very square blocky arms and legs
They have similar eyes, either 2 glowing human shaped eyes, or else a single lens like a pair of sunglasses.
They either have lips or else a mask that hides their lips.
And of course, a big visual hook, as well as thematic hook, they all transform into other things, mostly vehicles. And so in robot form they have elements of their vehicle attached such as tires or wings.

Gobots

The Gobots came out slightly before the Transformers, the two franchises have many similarities but a few differences.

One of their biggest design differences was their simplicity. Many of their arms didn't bend at the elbow in their toy form. Instead of 10 or more steps to transform them, they would transform in 2-3 steps.
Most of them were also smaller than their Transformers cousins.

Bayformers

When Michael Bay did his version of the Transformers, many of the visual rules that defined the Transformers toys, comic and TV show were thrown out the window.

The number one difference, silhouette complexity. While the original Transformers were boxy and had some simple shapes, the Bayformers were hyper complex, no more boxes, just tons and tons of smaller details everywhere. Regardless of how you feel about these designs, you have to admit they are unique looking and pretty easily recognizable as a Bayformer.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

For the Evangelion robots, a tremendously popular anime from the 90s, a very different aesthetic.

The main visual hook is they are all very tall and thin, almost anemic.
They also tend to hunched backs. Many have items on their shoulders that make their shoulders taller than their heads.
They have very bright saturated primary colors.
The bad guy robots in this series, the "angels", have far more variety in shape, although even they tend to all have a giant red orb somewhere on or in their body as a way to define them as a group.

Five Star Stories

These mechs were designed by Mamoru Nagano, and have a very distinct visual style.

In general his mechs seem like a cross between a knight and a ballet dancer.
They tend to have very thick shoulders, and their waists are ridiculously skinny
The symbols and logo designs feel very medieval
They all have helmets with visors.
They carry long swords or lances and many have shields.

Maschinen Krieger

These mechs were designed by Japanese artist and sculptor Kow Yokoyama

These mechs have a distinct world war 2 tank feel to them.
Their colors are all pretty muted, either green camo, whitish grey or sand colored.
Their cockpits have this big bubble feel to them, frequently without any eyeholes. This makes the mechs very top heavy, like they might fall over.

Mazinger / Grendizer

The good guy mechs of Go Nagai all have much in common.

They tend to have a similar color scheme, black, red and blue and white with yellow accents.
Their colors are bright and saturated.
Their arms and legs are simple cylinders.
They all have horns

The bad guy robots also share a lot of common DNA

They have similar cylindrical arms.
But they also look like recognizable beasts.
And also have faces that frequently look like tribal animals masks from Japan or Africa.
In Grendizer, all of the bad robots transform from a flying saucer, so they all have some sort of saucer element to them.

Pacific Rim

A more recent mech franchise, owing a lot to the mechs that have come before. I almost didn't include this franchise as its visual hooks are more subtle, but there's a story reason for that, and story should always trump design.

These mechs have a variety of visual hooks unique to each mech, for example, Cherno Alpha has a giant reactor for a head. Crimson Typhoon has 3 arms and is bright red. And Gypsy Danger is the most humanoid of the bunch.
Since in the story each mech was created by a different country, having variety in each mech and not making them all look too similar is a story point.
But even with such variety, there are still some things that define the Pacific Rim look. First the details, they all have a similar look to their paneling and drips and wear.
They are pretty much all bright saturated colors.
They all contain multiple pilots in a control room that's pretty similar, so the insides of the mech are actually the more consistent visual hook.

Real Steel

These mech again have unique looks to define each combatant, but they do share some common DNA. They are also loosely based on a toy from the 60s called Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots.

They are all quite rounded on the arms and legs.
They are all pretty humanoid in shape
And most importantly, since they're all boxers, their main visual hook is they all have big robotic equivalent of boxing gloves.

Battletech

The first Battletech mechs were actually taken from a number of existing japanese mechs such as Macross. But later Battletech games came into their own design wise.

Battletech mechs tend to be more square and blocky in shape.
They also tend to have giant weapons that replace their arms, or are mounted near their arms.
Many of them have prominent cockpits, like they're giant vehicles almost more than mechs.
Many but not all have digigrade legs, so they look a little like a chicken.

Hyper Weapon

The mechs of Makoto Kobayashi, when he isn't contributing to works such as Gundam or Battleship Yamato, all have many similar attributes.

The overall shapes of the mechs tend to have a slightly melted feel, they aren't square, but they aren't round, they feel like medieval cast iron pots
Exposed piping is a common theme, especially in joint areas
Also very tiny heads compared to body size is a common attribute.

Giant Killer Robots

This IP from Weta Workshop is for a table top game.

They have strong primary colors.
The mechs all have limbs that are flat rectangles.
The arms and legs have flat panels that have some sort of logo or visual pattern.
They heads all tend to be very inhuman like.

Zoids

This 80s IP is actually seeing a bit of a resurgence these days.

First obvious visual hook is that all the mechs are based on dinosaurs
Second, they looks sort of like dinosaur bones that armor plates have been attached to
Third, they all have similar colors, with heavy use of chrome
And they also have these little cylindrical plugs on all of the joints.

Warhammer 40k

Warhammer's space IP has been around for years, and while there's more focus on the space marines, there's also some mechs in there.

Most of the mechs have exposed rivets, like you're attaching giant sheets of metal together in the fastest way possible.
They look a little like medieval armor
They all have eagle crests and similar insignias on them
They have a hunched back, where the head isn't to highest part of the body.

Iron Harvest

Iron Harvest is from a diesel punk videogame based on artwork by Jakub Różalski.

The robots all tend to have skinny legs and arms and fat bodies
They are made up of metal that wouldn't be out of place on old steam locomotives, including exposed rivets
Lots of exposed piping and greebles that wouldn't be out of place in an old boiler room.
Lots of rust and patina

Big-O

Big-O is another japanese anime, a more recent one this time.

The robot's arms tend to be big cylinders that are attached to the body at the midpoint, instead of trying to replicate a human arm where the upper arm is attached to the top part of the lower arm.
They have a number of similar details, such as segmented bellies. Similar style feet. Similar sized upper legs. And oversized hands.

Horizon Zero Dawn

While not a mech IP exactly, Horizon Zero Dawn's robots all have a very distinctive look.

First, they're based on animals or dinosaurs.
Next, they are heavily segmented, with lots and lots of visual detail.
Unlike the Bayformers, the visual detail tends to remain inside a simpler silhouette, rather than breaking the silhouette.
They're materials are a combination of metal and other advanced materials like carbon fiber.
They have glowing elements inside the robot bodies.

Zone Of The Enders

Another japanese mech IP that has appeared in TV shows and videogames, I'm not as familiar with this property but I see it show up a lot...

The mechs tend to wear motorcycle type helmets
They tend not to have feet, but their legs end in a sharp shape (I believe this is due to the fact they are in space, no need for feet when there's nothing to stand on)
They tend to have wings, frequently made up of multiple floating segments.
They have long protruding appendages from their lower belly.

Conclusion

So now we've looked at many Mech IPs, and seen the various details and hooks they use to be recognizable. Any mech has certain things in common, but beyond that they all have elements to make them stand apart.

So the next time you design a mech, before your first pen mark on the paper, what will be the mech's visual hook. A shape? A historical period? A pattern? A certain type of weapon?

Or maybe draw a bunch of really rough mechs, see if any major element speaks to you, and if it does, start basing a whole mech army using variations of that element.

And of course, as shown earlier, this type of thinking doesn't only apply to mechs, but any sort of design. Having a strong visual hook is THE thing that will bring attention to your idea, and make it stand above the rest. So next time you're designing a character, an environment, or a whole IP, keep its visual hook in mind. Your work will be much stronger for it.