Baby Yoda has been through extensive design changes and many iterations before there was agreement on the final design. Director John Favreau wanted to have big pupils in the eyes, to keep it more animal-like. However, by having giant eyes it would also look like a cute baby. Despite him being a baby, there was also a lot of importance put on giving him wrinkles and bumps to make him look his actual age which is 50 (Szostak, 2020). Conscious choices were made as to how much of the design would resemble the original Yoda. Of course, the original Yoda served as a primary reference for the design of Baby Yoda to ensure they would appear to be from the same race. In one of the final versions concept artist Doug Chiang said that there was just enough Yoda in the design, but that it was also fresh enough to make it its own character (Szostak, 2020).
According to one of the concept designers Christian Alzmann, namely the mouth and cheeks contributed to its cuteness by having a little overbite and barely any chin. Moreover they also mentioned that slightly rotating his almond-shaped eyes made him cute (Szostak, 2020). The scale of Baby Yoda was based on the character Gizmo from the movie Gremlins. When comparing the two characters, the proportions of the face and body are very similar (Szostak, 2020). In addition to this Baby Yoda wears oversized clothing which, as mentioned by concept artist Alzmann, makes babies in general look extremely cute (Szostak, 2020).
After developing the concept art, the task to create the real-life version of Baby Yoda was given to VFX company Legacy Effects (Adekaiyero, 2023). It took the company around three months and 5 million USD to develop the animatronic puppet which takes three people to operate features such as body movement and his eyes (Adekaiyero, 2023). The Baby Yoda that can be seen in The Mandalorian is almost exclusively the puppet, but is sometimes enhanced by using CGI. Producers John Favreau and Dave Filoni state that they wanted to use the ‘old techniques’ as much as possible to stay true to the aesthetic of the original trilogy (Couch, 2019).