WHAT TO SUBMIT ✅
Anything can be the source of inspiration for a great Idea. Item themes and clothing types are entirely up to you. Here's what to consider as you design and share your item Ideas:
👚 Wearable Avatar Items
Ideas only accepts items that customise your avatar's features (eyes, noses, hair, body shape), clothing, and accessories.
☝️ Single Items
Ideas accepts individual pieces only. Some items might have built-in arms, legs, or accessories, but we won't approve anything that could be released as multiple items. A hair item with built-in ears and hairclips, for example, may be rejected for containing three potential items instead of one.
✏️ Finished-Looking Designs
Your submission needs to clearly show what the player will actually get. Rough sketches, unclear concepts, and half-finished designs will be rejected.
This matters because backers preorder based on your picture, and our artists build what's in that picture. When a design is vague, the finished item often isn't what you had in mind, and everyone waiting behind you in the queue waits longer.
If drawing isn't your strength, commissioning a fellow Highrise artist is completely legitimate. See Commissioned Items below.
💡 Original Items
Share fresh designs. We don't accept redesigns, and an Idea may be rejected if it's too similar to an existing item, whether or not the similarity is intentional.
We're also stricter than we used to be about designs that follow a trend. When one Idea funds, we tend to see a wave of near-identical submissions chasing it. Those won't be approved.
Accidental similarity gets your Idea rejected. Deliberately copying another player's item is different, and is covered under Copied Work below.
A small exception is the use of BRANDING to create a unique line of bespoke items. If you're building a brand around a particular item type (like shoes) or a specific aesthetic (like a curvy body shape), we allow greater flexibility in how you reuse your own item bases, styles, and rendering. Branding is limited to items originally released in HR Ideas; Concept entries are not eligible for use as future Ideas item bases.
🌈 Fixed Colors
We only accept items that change colour "naturally". Hair, eyes, lips, and blushes are all acceptable. We do not accept colour change on items that wouldn't change colour in real life, such as handbags, scrunchies, gowns, shirts, or shoes.
- VALID COLOR CHANGE: hair, lips, eyes, eyebrows, facial hair, clip-in bangs, freckles, blush. Items with built-in body parts are also acceptable, including posed arms and legs, rider items, crop tops with exposed skin, and items that tweak avatar body proportions.
- INVALID COLOR CHANGE: clothing, auras, makeup, or accessory items that change based on hair, skin, lip, or eye colour. Items that colour change according to unnatural dependencies are also invalid, such as hair that changes with eye colour, or eyes that change with lip colour.
Body parts that typically have hair are valid for colour-changing. Animal ears, tails, and other fur-clad or scale-clad body parts may change colour.
📄 Appropriately Categorized Items
As you create your submission, you'll define the item's type. Review the categories (shirt, aura, lips, bag, and so on) to make sure your item will layer properly.
Item type also determines your item's price, so pick carefully. You don't choose a rarity: all Ideas items are Legendary. See the Overview for prices and the reasoning behind them.
👛 Commissioned Items
Have a great Idea but don't feel confident in your artistic ability? You can commission a fellow Highrise artist to help bring your vision to life.
Commissions are considered "Trust Trades". All payment or compensation must be handled before you submit your Idea, and Highrise is not responsible for ensuring commission payments are delivered.
In a commissioned submission, tag the item image and description to say it's commissioned work. Use "Commission from __" with your artist's name so our team doesn't accidentally remove your entry.
Commissioned items released in-game may include attribution to both usernames, on request by the person who submitted the Idea. Gold division in any commission or collaboration is decided between the players involved. Items released before February 19th, 2026 retain their original attributions.
WHAT WE'RE NOT ACCEPTING ❌
Ideas may be rejected by our team at any point. Here are the most common reasons why:
🤖 AI Entries
AI-generated submissions are not accepted. When you submit, you're confirming your design is your own work, and breaking that confirmation means a permanent ban from Highrise Ideas.
Ideas exists so that the people designing for Highrise get their work made and get paid for it. An AI output isn't your design, and putting your name on one takes a funding slot from someone who drew theirs.
🚫 Copied Work
Basing your Idea on another player's item is grounds for a permanent ban from Highrise Ideas.
This is separate from accidental similarity, which simply gets an Idea rejected. Deliberately taking someone else's design is theft from an artist in this community, and we treat it that way.
If you see an Idea copying a player-made item, report it with the Flag Icon and include the name of the item it's based on.
🛌 Furniture Items
🧸 Pets, or any Pet accessory
👁️ Lenses
🖼️ Profile Backgrounds
Stick to the wearables, please.
🔐 Account Bound Items
We can't honour requests to make specific items permanently or temporarily Account Bound. Every Ideas item follows the same release rules: it can't be traded or gifted during its 7-day sale week, and trades normally after that.
🦋 Animated Items
⚖️ Copyrighted Material
No third-party Intellectual Property (IP) may be used in your submission. This includes:
- Trademarked logos or products
- Branded clothing, accessories, or items
- Fictional characters (anime, movies, games, comics, books, and so on)
- Franchise-based visual cues (colour schemes, weapon designs, creature designs, and so on)
- Celebrity likenesses or personas. No recognisable images of real people, celebrities, or public figures
- Stock images or clip art
📹 Stock Elements
Pre-fab brushes, templates, textures, and other graphic elements may not be included. You may use these tools in creating your Idea if they're licensed for commercial use, or if they don't make up the majority of your design.
For example, you may use a free, publicly accessible sparkle asset to add shine to a sequined dress that you designed yourself.
A NOTE ON STYLE
Highrise's art style lives on the border between realistic, highly rendered graphics and simple, cartoony styles.
Community concept art is as unique as each individual designer, and part of our art team's job is to translate those varied styles into the Highrise style for each successful campaign. Our virtual world is built on mixing and matching thousands of items, so a cohesive catalogue with a unified aesthetic really matters.
Because of this, some changes to your concept art style may be necessary. Highly detailed, rendered items may be simplified. Flatter, less shaded concepts may be given more depth to bring them into style.
Hair in particular is tricky to get right, since it needs to be mix-and-matchable with different fronts and backs. We won't reject an item for being too rendered, but very realistic, HD items will be brought more in line with the rest of our catalogue.
Here's the level of rendering we're able to give our hair items:
Up close, this is how we build our hair strands, from the deepest base shade all the way up to the shiniest highlights:
🔗 Not sure how to bring your concept art into style? There are plenty of examples in our Art Guides.
NOTES
- Ideas may be rejected by Highrise staff at any stage during the Funding or Production Phase for technical constraints, quality considerations, or community guideline infringements by the designer.
- Highrise staff may adjust an item's name or category if necessary. Our art team may adjust an item's appearance based on technical limitations, which can affect proportions, hair layering, or rendering. See A Note On Style above.
- Submit under your own account. Duplicate entries submitted under alt accounts will be removed.
- You may submit any single-item design to both Concepts and Ideas simultaneously. We'll create whichever entry is successful first.
- Given the volume of Ideas we receive, we may not share personalised explanations for why an Idea was rejected. We always welcome resubmissions, so look over this list, reassess your Idea, and try again.
