How was Ryuk designed?

Takeshi Obata's first idea for Ryuk was a young man similar to Light, with black hair and wings: he imagined the shinigami as attractive rock stars. He scrapped it for two reasons. A Ryuk more attractive than Light would have stolen the story, and his editor told him Ryuk did not have to appear human at all. Obata kept the wings and rebuilt everything else into the hulking, grinning monster of the finished manga, a face he liked because, as he put it, you can never really tell what he is thinking.

Getting there took work. Obata has said he struggled with the bone structure of Ryuk's face in the pilot chapter and only settled it during serialization, and in Death Note 13: How to Read he floated an idea he never used in the story: that Ryuk's face might be a mask, with an attractive face underneath. Finalizing Ryuk also set the template; Obata has said that once Ryuk's design was locked, it set the tone for the other shinigami and for the notebook itself.

The apples, meanwhile, were the writer's call, and a practical one. Ohba put apples in the thumbnails because the red reads well against Ryuk's black body and because they fit his big mouth. When Obata suggested the fruit carried religious and psychological symbolism, Ohba answered that he had not thought about that at all: apples are cool, that is it.