Money Heist

Funko Pop inspired character icons for La Casa de Papel — built on golden-ratio construction and documented like a real brand.

Type:

Illustration / digital

Role:

Concept, illustration

Output:

Icon set, brandbook

The brief

Money Heist — La Casa de Papel — arrived in 2017 and got popular enough to be merchandised, Funko Pops included. These icons borrow from both: the series, and the toy line that flattened it into something collectable.

The challenge is stylisation under constraint. Funko's proportions are unforgiving — miss them and the reference disappears. Hit them and a character survives on a jumpsuit and a jawline.

Research & concepts

Intro screens on a laptop and phone: the series poster and a fact sheet on La Casa de Papel

Study the source before touching a pen.

Reference gathering covered both halves — the characters as the series presents them, and the Funko system that had to hold them. What stays, what gets abstracted, and the one detail that still identifies each of them at 32 pixels.

Sketch to final: each character starts in pencil, then gets rebuilt on the grid

The five shared rules with measurements: same head shape, perfect-circle eyes, no stroke, small neck, shared suit — Five shared rules every icon follows

Design

02 — implement and produce

Golden ratios

The cute comes from maths.

Each head starts as a set of golden-ratio circles and rectangles. The circles shape the skull, hair and hood, and the rectangles fix where the eyes, neck and shoulders sit. Because all six characters are built on the same proportions, the Mask, Nairobi, Tokio, the Professor, Oslo and Lisboa look like one family even with completely different hair, beards and glasses.

Every icon sits on the same construction grid, so the set holds together whether you see one or all eight. The golden ratio does the proportional work; the grid keeps the family resemblance.

Golden-ratio construction for the Mask, Nairobi and Tokio icons: circles and rectangles overlaid on each head

Golden-ratio construction for the Professor, Oslo and Lisboa icons: circles and rectangles overlaid on each head and body

03 — colour

The palette is the plot

Red jumpsuits, white masks. The series hands you a palette strong enough to do half the identifying — the icons only have to use it honestly.

Colour scheme: each of the six characters above a fan of swatches with hex and Pantone values — Colour scheme: every character gets its own swatch fan, with hex and Pantone values

Colour DNA: each character inside concentric rings of their palette, with hex codes, on a laptop — Colour DNA: the same palettes as rings, so you can see each character’s balance of red, skin and hair

Testing & iteration

Icons get tested at the size they'll actually be used, not the size they're drawn. Anything that survives shrinking to a favicon and still reads as the right character stays. Everything else gets simplified until it does.

Size test

Each icon was shrunk from 200px down to a 16px browser favicon. If Oslo was still recognisably Oslo at the smallest size, the design stayed. If not, it went back for simpler shapes and stronger contrast.

What I'd do differently

I built the golden-ratio grid before the first icon, because it was defensible.

Two of the characters would read better with those proportions broken — the mask needs more width than the construction allows. I would draw three icons freehand, find where the family resemblance actually lives, and only then write the grid that protects it.

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