Style guide implementation problems and solution suggestions in licensing characters

The working sphere of graphic designers is expanding day by day and designers are needed at each step of production. Among the variety services or products, the stronger the design stands out and the longer it lives. Today, character and cartoon design have reached very large volumes that can easily reach every corner of the world as a business, and more detailed work has been required. Before character and cartoon design, a comprehensive work is needed as well. Style Guide, or Visual Guideline preparation has become a business line at least as big as the design of the character. The product preparation depends on the visual guide, sticking to the corporate identity of the character of the producers. Although only cartoon work was sufficient in the past years, the desire of both viewers and producers to transform the character phase into a product is rapidly increasing, and visual guidance becomes more and more important. The visual guide for each of the production is becoming compulsory from toys to posters, from performing arts to the products. The visual guide, which should be kept alive and growing throughout the life of the character, represents the institutional identity of the character and increases the importance of the document day by day in order to protect both the characters from misapplication and to produce the correct product by the manufacturer. With this work, both the pre-design and the design phase, what is needed to make a visual guide that is ready for use and constantly could be updated, are prepared in the field feedback information. Character and cartoons have become a business line that can be done with a team work of many business fields such as, arts, pedagogy, animation knowledge, production technologies, marketing strategies, consumption trends. The necessity of each of the business lines to work in a more harmonious and communicative manner has arisen. In the study which includes information about cartoons, the works that are required for the contemporary characters and cartoons to respond to the consumer are listed. The points that need to be done for the long life of the work are emphasized. The study is designed to prepare a visual guide and to provide a solution to the problems arising from needs. The lack of written sources in this area have made the work more important and necessary. As the greatest source, the experiences of graphic designers working in the character design industry and using visual guidance and their opinions have been turned into academic texts. The problem of the licensed character world, which is a very new field of work for our country, and the possible problems and solutions that can be encountered, have been completed based on the feedback information of the units that use visual guidance.