 Aki's appearance was conceived by the lead animator of the project, Roy Sato, who created several conceptual designs for Sakaguchi to consider, and then used the selected design as a guide for her character model. Sato perceived Aki's original look as a "supermodel", and subsequently removed her make-up and shortened her hair in order to give her a more intelligent look that would "convince people that she's a scientist." In an interview, Sato described actively trying to make her appear as realistic as possible, making her similar to himself in as many ways as he could in the animation, including elements of his personality through facial expressions. He concluded that Aki ended up being similar to him in almost every way, with the exception that "she's a lot cuter". The model for Aki was designed to closely follow human appearance, with Sakaguchi commenting in an interview "I think it's OK to look at Aki and be convinced that she's a human."
