Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars(boringavatars.com) |
Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars(boringavatars.com) |
Please remove react so more people could use it :)
https://en.gravatar.com/site/implement/images/
Gravatar provides 5 fallback custom avatars:
identicon: a geometric pattern based on an email hash
monsterid: a generated 'monster' with different colors, faces, etc
wavatar: generated faces with differing features and backgrounds
retro: awesome generated, 8-bit arcade-style pixelated faces
robohash: a generated robot with different colors, faces, etA lot of these look too similar. The really boring approach IMO is to choose a random solid color and put the user's initial(s) on top of it. This makes it pretty unique and much easier to associate someone back to their avatar.
I agree that it's a good simple baseline, but going on a minor off-topic rant, I find it very annoying when this is implemented under the anglocentric assumption of names always being of the format Firstname (Middlename) Surname everywhere, and thus always parsing the initials as "FS". As a result, Spanish people whose naming custom is Firstname(s) 1stSurname 2ndSurname, where the 2nd surname is the "droppable" one, are inappropriately rendered. Director Pedro Almodóvar Caballero becomes "PC", rather than the acceptable versions "PA" or "PAC".
I've had the opposite issue in Korea. Several systems expected LastFirst (from my perspective).
Just because the default example is based on one set of assumptions does not mean the project is inherently limited or biased.
Aside from identicons (which I think work rather well), I believe that a large Mondrian style image with a random circle on it that is then rotated, and scaled to the appropriate size (and cropped if constrained to a rectangle).
This allows for an image that attempts to avoids problem with color vision.
The issue that I had with the Boring Avatars is that too many of them were the same. Switching to ring or sunset had many identical ones. The Bauhaus version had a limited pallet so that the same three colors occurred frequently and only distinctions were in orientations of objects which weren't that distinctive themselves.
The amount of uniqueness per image in this is rather low. The solid color and letter you mentioned has more easy to identify uniqueness.
Sure but context is everything.
Chances are millions of users aren't all posting in the same thread / post / chat room / etc. at once. There might only be a few dozen or even hundreds of them, and the odds of hitting 2 people with the same name + similar color are really low then. Plus on top of that, some users will have custom avatars they've uploaded to make the sample size even less for running into a collision.
Google also happens to use the random color + first initial pattern too and they have over a billion users. It works, even in a busy Google Doc.
Beam definitely meets that criteria (there's nothing like faces to trigger your brain's distinguishing algorithm), and Bauhaus could do (although I'd add a few more colours into the mix, and maybe not use all of them in every avatar).
The rest really don't.
Some people are visually impaired or face-blind so this shouldn't be the sole means of identifying users, but for most of us, avatars are really important. There are people who I know from online fora that I haven't visited in years but I still remember exactly what their avatars looked like.
[1]: https://github.com/boringdesigners/boring-avatars/blob/maste...
In this case, I guess the developer wanted to use JSX to create it. And you could ofc use JSX without React. But most people are used to using it in react-context, and plan to use it in an react-app anyway.
So to answer your question, in my eyes it would be. Why not? If the devs plan on using it in react-app anyway, it's not their job to make sure it supports everyone elses usecase.
I have no problem with people writing code for themselves. But if that is what you do, please don't post on Hacker News about it.
Here's another fun one: https://getavataaars.com/
But I still like this project.
I was hoping though to enter my name somewhere on that page to test it out, as I have negative infinity js skills :-/
I've dabbled with this in the past, what I found very helpful was symmetry -- this works especially well with abstract shape ones. Generate a piece, then mirror it horizontally (or vertically, or both). I found this kind of visual redundancy made the glyphs more attractive to look at, and more distinct / easier to tell apart.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/37328/my-god-its-fu...
> If you want bigger and/or higher-quality images, the avatar generation code (including a command-line app) is at https://bitbucket.org/balpha/go-unicornify.
The code appears to have been migrated to GitHub at https://github.com/codingisacopingstrategy/unicornify and the about page on https://web.archive.org/web/20100428132341/http://unicornify...
The code is also at https://bitbucket-archive.softwareheritage.org/projects/ba/b...
https://idbloc.co/blog/product/update/2019/05/09/toggles-ide...
These are basically a hash in visual format.
There's some prior work on this: e.g. https://github.com/lfades/static-tweet and https://github.com/vercel/og-image.
I especially like Beam and Bauhaus. Beam should definitely be the default.
In fact, it has a function to generate random hex colors too, and you can even filter it to only generate darker colors so you can create nice looking random avatar circles with a white text color to ensure you get good contrast ratios without having to worry about doing a YIQ based contrast calculation.
Personally, I saw enough general distinctive qualities among them that I felt like if I interacted with a handful of these avatars frequently that I would notice the minor differences easily.
When I talk about auto racing I'm not excluding martial artists. I'm just not talking about them because the subject is auto racing.
It's all open source. If you want a vanilla js implementation go ahead.
https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library
React is a small part of the web(in terms of the number of people using it commercially) and thus a library written in React isn't terribly useful for most of the market.
"When you are accustomed to privilege, equality can feel like oppression."
what you are saying is that, now that women are accustomed to their privilege, equality (including men in the field of faces) would feel like oppression again, so best to leave them out?
This tweaks on that notion. Somebody got angry about it. That person got downvoted. We all learned a tiny lesson about the ways that women get excluded regularly, and how that would make you feel.
If one particular HN poster learned a lesson that not everybody supports them on "I won't complain about lists that exclude women but I will complain about lists that exclude men, and pretend it's about equality", then that's another tiny bonus. Not a big one, but this is the kind of thing that happens in tiny increments.
And why does that matter? The OP is someone's toy project, not an attempt at starting a SaaS company.