Visual Real Estate and Jhin
After seeing the reveal of Jhin, I started feeling that he looked very... boring and after letting his reveal digest a bit (
), I think I know why I feel disappointed by how he looks:
Visual Real Estate is something I was introduced to a long time ago when I was still playing World of Warcraft. It's fairly common knowledge that game has a weird issue with character outfits that have absurdly large shoulder pads and belts, and I recall reading the forums one day when one of the game designers decided to chip in as to why they kept growing in size.
The Blue, as they're called (since their names appear in blue), said that the bigger they were in size, the more the art team had to work with in terms of designs and details. Fair enough, I thought. It seemed logical that having only a fairly thin band for a belt would be limiting to what you could do with it in terms of a canvas.
Fast forward a few years to what I think was the conversation that IronStylus and some other Rioters were having over Taric a few months back (it may or may not have been this and anyone able to find the exact quote is entitled to a couple dozen poro-snax).
The topic in question being capes and the fact that large capes blocked a lot of the character's appearance, hindering what you can do with a character since so much of the visual real estate was devoted to the cape.
Fast forward again to the Jhin reveal and, well... look...
Visually, he's not a whole lot more than a poncho with limbs and the size of the poncho makes it feel like there's just so little to his appearance. If it was something more akin to the poncho that Graves wore, shifted to the side so it wasn't the complete focus of the body, it'd probably look a lot nicer, because more could be done with his appearance.
TL;DR: Feels like Jhin's poncho covers his body too much.
