Jeff Simpson brings anatomy into unsettling character experiments

By Grace Kim

Jeff Simpson designed characters and creatures for three named projects: Assassin’s Creed Origins, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Marvel’s Moon Knight.

Design You Trust’s profile traces Simpson’s career through Marvel Studios, Ubisoft, Eidos and Wizards of the Coast. It calls him an experienced concept artist (one who designs visual concepts) and visual development specialist (one who develops visual directions for production).

That background makes the personal experiments easier to place. The profile says Simpson “seems more interested in figuring out what happens when nature itself starts making terrible decisions.” Its focus is less a conventional character showcase than a study of bodies behaving badly.

The collection presents three related visual modes:

• Human faces dissolve into scarred flesh, replacing a stable likeness with a damaged surface.
• Mysterious figures disappear beneath elaborate masks, turning concealment into bulk and silhouette.
• Monstrous machines resemble the skeletons of creatures that never existed, making anatomy both recognizable and impossible.

Across all three, forms appear to have evolved somewhere they should not have. Design You Trust describes the broader subjects as character designs, grotesque creatures and biomechanical experiments. Biomechanical (the fusion of organic anatomy and machinery) is the most literal term: Simpson’s machines follow the structural logic of bone without belonging to any natural body.

The feature also moves between rough, spontaneous sketches, carefully developed digital paintings and three-dimensional explorations. Simpson frequently allows forms to emerge through an unpredictable creative process, according to the profile. Instead of forcing every idea into a predetermined design, he embraces accidents and unexpected directions.

That openness alters the role of proportion and anatomy. Design You Trust says Simpson’s personal work gives priority to anatomical experimentation, distorted proportions and unconventional silhouettes over conventional ideas of beauty. The profile’s verdict is blunt: “The resulting characters aren’t necessarily pleasant to look at, but they’re remarkably difficult to forget.”

The tension between discomfort and recall gives the images their force. A mask can conceal identity while exaggerating posture; scarred flesh can make a face look unstable; a machine can borrow the authority of a skeleton without becoming a recognizable animal. Simpson’s Instagram account, @jeffsimpsonkh, provides the feature’s direct route to the wider sequence.

What does this change for character design?

The practical change is procedural rather than merely stylistic. Simpson’s method makes room for accidents without treating spontaneity as an endpoint: a rough mark, digital painting or three-dimensional study can redirect a design toward an anatomical problem that a predetermined plan might suppress.

For an artist, the distinction is between an accident that opens a viable direction and one that merely interrupts an existing one. The profile does not claim Simpson used this experimental method on Assassin’s Creed Origins, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey or Moon Knight. It shows instead why the personal portfolio matters: it tests the mechanism by which a flawed or unstable body becomes a specific character.

The next test is not whether Simpson can produce a memorable image; his portfolio supplies many. It is whether the same balance between accident and design can travel from open-ended personal work into a named future production, which the profile does not specify.