The Essential Shape
There’s something satisfying about seeing Chun-Li rendered as a low-poly model. The geometry is clean, the colors pop, and somehow she’s more recognizably herself than in most official art. Michael Firman’s been doing this for a while—taking characters I’ve known forever and reducing them to clean geometric shapes. Link, Mega Man, the whole Nintendo roster. The style reads instantly, which shouldn’t be possible.
Firman’s a Canadian illustrator and designer whose specialty is stripping beloved pop culture down to its essentials. Not in a reductive way, but in a clarifying one. The silhouette carries the character. The color palette seals it. Everything else becomes noise. You’d think you’d lose something in the translation, but his work shows otherwise.
He’s not just working from video games. Star Wars characters, the cast of Moana, Game of Thrones figures—they all get the same treatment. The low-poly style works across everything because it’s fundamentally honest. It forces the designer to make every choice count. There’s nowhere to hide, no detail to lean on.
As a designer, I respect that kind of constraint. The discipline. The clarity. Most of my work gets spent adding layers, trying different approaches, second-guessing myself. Watching someone work with this level of limitation—where everything has to earn its place—reminds me that sometimes the work gets better when you take things away.
I think about the impulse behind this kind of work, the refraction of characters that matter. These figures have lived in our heads long enough that we want to see them through different lenses. Firman’s lens is clean and economical. And somehow it makes them look more vivid, not less.