A portion of a Famitsu interview with designer Atsuko Nishida...

Famitsu: How long did it take you to come up with the image you want to go with?

Nishida: Fairly quickly for all the non-human characters. (laughs)

Wada: You came up with Pochica right away! (laughs)

Nishida: When it comes to designing human characters, there’s a lot of limitations. I tried not to do anything too out of the ordinary. But if I limit myself too much, all the characters will start to look the same. Therefore, I paid close attention to details such as the color and hairstyle to create well-balanced characters. Then, I referenced the scenario written by Sakura-san and let my imagination run to add more decoration.

Wada: Each character was created with a flower motif.

Nishida: Ah, yes. That’s right.

Famitsu: Do you mean you gave an image of a flower to each character?

Sakura: I received a request from Nishida-san that she’d like to know what kind of flower each character would be. She said that she wanted to extend the imagery based on the language of flowers (Hana-Kotoba) or flower color. I wasn’t thinking about that kind of thing when I created the characters, so I went and bought a flower encyclopedia and researched a lot! Then, I chose a flower for each character, and let Nishida-san know. I don’t know if it helped at all…

Nishida: It helped me tremendously!