The big board for the night at Star Wars Celebration was Doug Chiang: Designing The Mandalorian, which features Lucasfilm’s Vice President and Executive Creative Director of Star Wars, who also served as design supervisor on Season 1 of The Mandalorian and production designer a close second, showcasing all kinds of art and behind the scenes. Of course, at a certain point Chiang talked about the design process of Grogu, known around the world as Baby Yoda. Chiang called it the “hardest design” of the series, saying they spent a lot of time working on a “too thin line not to be too cute” but also something fans will love.
“Finally we’re back to something more like Yoda, and that seemed to be the better direction,” Chiang said. “We’ve all been spinning about something, we knew we were in the zone, but none of those were making the perfect note of Jon (Favreau). Jon kept calling him ‘ugly cute,’ something that wasn’t designed to be nice. It turns out that the eyes were the key, John wanted them to be like a dog with giant dark pupils; and he observed like a human, when human eyes, when you can see the eggs and the color of his eyes, so strange and so fast. And this is really curious because Yoda has human eyes, and they look great to him, but strange when We gave Grogu’s human eyes look scary and psychotic.”
Chiang added, “Like a small dog, there is just enough white in its eyes to make it look cool. Seeing that tiny bit of white gave its eyes a very charming and sympathetic look. — a kind worker.”
You can see a picture of Grogu with human eyes, and other concept art below!
