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Show HN: Generate avatars from user initials

ui-avatars.com

164 pointslasserafn96 comments

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Two of my favorite avatar generators:

https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/article391/cat-avatar-genera...

the furry version of

https://robohash.org/

Haha, they're so great!

There's also this one: http://avatars.adorable.io

generative anime avatars.

https://hiroshiba.github.io/girl_friend_factory/index.html

https://makegirlsmoe.github.io/

Robohash is fantastic. I have been using its output as my personal avatar for years now. Sad thing is that I can’t remember the input I used to generate the robot I use.

Unlike most of these, the robots are pretty distinctive.

Looks like robohash has the cat one: https://robohash.org/lala.png?set=set4

Oh wow the cat avatars are SO INCREDIBLY CUTE

Cool to see thai on the header example. However the results doesn't really make sense, for example this "name" โจ เคน (Jo Keen) has the first letters of each word จ (j) and ค (k) despite the order. However the service outputs โ (o) and เ (k).

If you really want to support it, you could maybe put some simple rules (might work in 90% of all cases) that you only grab the 1st consonant in each word. However even that won't be 100% correct because.. well, language rules basically.

Nice idea. As one wrote, this can easily done with one line of JS but having this as an web API which returns an image file is definitely neat.

However, I see a privacy issue with sending all my user's real names to some 3rd party service (even if they claim there's no tracking or something similar).

Absolutely, I'd probably also just use CSS and HTML and use the core package: https://github.com/lasserafn/php-initials to generate the initials, it's faster and you won't depend on third-party.

I absolutely see your point, that's also why I open-sourced the code (see footer), but obviously I could be using different code or track it on the server (nginx or similar?). This is not the case, but I understand. Another option is to use the core generator (which is also open sourced) so that the generation happens locally :) But then again, CSS+HTML does not require any generation

Why don't you rather provide a service which generates more complex avatars such as those from Github[1] or Slack.

Your API consumer sends some unique string (user-id, hashed user-id or hashed username or whatever they like) and you send back an unique avatar for that string. Moreover, you as the API provider offer different themes (e.g. tablecoth, space invaders, pixel-faces, etc.) which the consumer can again slightly customize (e.g. color, size, etc.) to have a unique style over all its avatars.

You current solution is elegant but at the same time just too easy to build oneself.

[1] There was a code golf competition on SE, maybe useful in this context: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/82290/generate-...

I built this service (or, the core GitHub package) because we needed it internally, and someone requested an API of this, so I quickly threw together this :-).

Also, I think theres a lot of those unique avatar generators out there (even one in the comments here), and I like them but they're not personal like your initials are. Also, for example, in accounting software (where I needed it internally) a monster or space invaders didn't fit with the audience.

I do however like your idea! Wouldn't be hard do create either. Who knows, that could be version 2

I think the key challenge with my proposed idea is to have another internal API just for the themes. Everybody can provide themes for the service and hook them into the main avatar service.

Imagine there would we just one avatar service where consumers can get thousands of different avatar-styles.

Didn't consider that aspect. That would be very cool! Okay, thats a little more of a challenge than generating some initials and making a circle, lol. I will investigate, sadly I'm not the most creative person, so wouldn't be as cool as https://robohash.org

If you use only the initials, you can cut or fake the other letters since they're ignored anyway. Not 100% privacy but better than sending the full name

Yes and true but this already half of the API. The rest is just the CSS for the rounded box and color.

Solid points :D Sadly theres not much I can do (I think?) to make people believe that there is privacy.

I guess generating them locally (or using CSS) would be the best option for anyone concerned with privacy

That was the approach I took to same probelm for users on an annotation service.

This seems nice but still overkill.

Yeah, it absolutely is (ui-avatars). I think its a neat little think to act as fallback for gravatar, but I totally agree that it's overkill

It won't be if you only send the first letter of the first and last name.

There's also this: https://github.com/tobiaslins/avatar

That's so cool!

Thanks! :) If you have any feedback for improvements, let me know!

SVG is awesome... but this is a basic enough subset of SVG that SVG is unwarranted. CSS will do this just fine (and any browser capable of displaying this SVG can probably support the CSS features required to pull this off).

I absolutely agree, I would also recommend anyone to use CSS and HTML, it's pretty straightforward.

However for those that: 1) Don't want to 2) Don't know how to 3) Required rendering besides HTML views

This can be pretty useful :-) I do agree with you. I would actually consider adding SVG support to this as well.

I don't understand why one would prefer an API to a CSS for this?

I'm not even saying don't add the dependency - why should this project be an API instead of some CSS that I load, and then write:

    <div class="ui-avatar-com ui-avatar-com-blue">OF</div>

The only thing I can see is the gravatar callback (which incidentally has to use a different endpoint anyway to work-around gravatar not supporting query params) - is that not as niche of a use as it seemed to me?

Probably because you don't have to have different css styles for many of the options like image size, font size, language, color. Though these can be achieved with css.

One use case I see is for native mobile apps to generate the avatars as an initial profile image during the signup.

It’s made to be a gravatar fallback :)

The reason its not CSS is because this api generates the initials for you.

CSS is way faster, so I’d recommend that

> The reason its not CSS is because this api generates the initials for you.

It's been a while since I've written any CSS, but I'm pretty sure you can select first letters? Useful for drop caps, for example.

Absolutely, but it’s not that simpel, it’s made to be flexible and handle different logic. Not that it’s magic by any means, it’s fairly simple but you’d want to generate the initials on the server anyway, to acomplish similar results

For example, it takes first letter of first name, and 2 letters from last name if only two names supplied and desired length is 3.

However if 3 names are supplied, it uses a letter from each name.

It’s not magic, but doing it in CSS wouldn’t be easy, I imagine

For web this is done with 1 line of Javascript and a div with rounded borders, really

   const initials = name.split(' ').map((n) => n.substr(0,1)).slice(0,2).join('')

   <div style="border-radius: 9999px; background-color: navy">
     <initials here>
   </div>

Adjust width, height, font-size to your liking

I'd absolutely recommend anyone, that has the ability, to generate them using HTML and CSS, it's way faster. You could even use the core package the generate the initials (as it's a little more than just each letter of each name)

Yep! Or even:

    const initials = name.match(/\b\w/g).join('')

JavaScript's \b in a regex doesn't like unicode.

But, yes, this does seem an odd thing to call out to a remote api for.

This would need some work to match the features of what was posted, but not much. https://jsfiddle.net/g6nrs5cq/

Note that the "take the first codepoint" approach doesn't work for all languages. Take Hindi for example. This is a name:

    प्रेरणा
    'preraṇa'

The convention for initials in Hindi is such that this would be the "initial":

    प्रे॰ (< प + ् + र + े + ॰)
    'pre'

which is the first four codepoints combined (because they are in some sense considered a single character) plus another codepoint!

If for some reason you needed to respect locale-specific initialism conventions for a lot of different locales, it might be worth introducing an abstraction for determining the initials of a name.

Thanks for letting me know! I will stuff different languages over the coming months to better manage such things :) didn’t know that

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

how about "border-radius: 50%"?

Yeah, it also works. 9999px stuck in my head for some reason.

Neat service. Reminds me of this add on for XenForo:

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/dynamic-letters-avat...

That said, I've personally never liked using dynamic avatars on websites I'm involved with. They've always seemed a bit generic, regardless of whether they're gravatars, these letter avatars, gender symbols, etc.

Always felt it'd work better if my services simply took a random avatar from a large gallery of thematically appropriate pictures instead. Like say, on a gaming forum it'd give them a random video game character picture, and on a TV show forum one from the show in question.

But that's just my opinion on the matter. This seems like it'll work well for people who like that stuff.

Woah, Robohash is 6 years old now, time goes so fast... https://robohash.org/

Wow, that is so cool! Can't believe I haven't seen this before.

I pulled invatar (https://github.com/Bekt/invatar) into my code base for Remarkbox (https://www.remarkbox.com)

invatar generates SVG and the way I use it is slightly different, I inline the SVG directly into HTML!

Super cool! I like the SVG support part

also, Remarkbox looks nice

Thanks! Please add yourself to the beta list, I'm launching another group this weekend!

Nice idea! What surprised me most: It is also very well executed, with a sane and simple API, good performance considerations, and it fits its purpose almost perfectly.

Having said that, please pardon my ignorance, but:

What's the advantage over simply not using an avatar at all?

Thanks you!

Honestly? Nothing really. Well, you don't have to think about the code part but besides that? Nothing. Actually it would be more performant to use CSS and HTML (or SVG?) to generate avatars. I have a core package (used to generate the initials), and if used that with html, it would be far better.

I use the service for our internal products, as gravatar fallbacks

Nice service - I was looking for something like this to generate default avatars for our SaaS app recently.

How does it handle middle names? i.e., does "John Arthur Smith" still return (JS)? What about reverse names, e.g. "Smith, John Arthur"? Is it smart enough to parse the comma and work out first/last initials from that?

Addendum: I also assume that you intend this service to be a 'once off' generation of a user avatar which can be stored locally? Do you rate limit so that people cannot simply dynamically generate avatars for ridiculous long lists of people on their web page?

Just tried it -- by default it renders the first and third initial: https://ui-avatars.com/api/?name=John+Doe+Third

You can add "&length=3" to the query string and it will render all three initials: https://ui-avatars.com/api/?name=John+Doe+Third&length=3

Thank you!

It handles last names and middle names as such:

- your example would be JS, however if you specify a desired length of 3, it would be: JAS.

I actually haven’t tested commas and such but I will definitively add this! Added it to my todo

Brilliant - thanks for this. Also, would be a nice feature to have the colours randomise themselves as an option, so that I could have different coloured avatars on my people listing without having to worry about generating pleasing colours and ensuring that the foreground and background do not clash.

It's funny you'd say this! I remember when I launched the core package on Github, someone suggested colors to be generated from the name or initials. I will look into this, it would be pretty neat! Thanks for the feedback :-)

I'd say random is better than generated from initials, to avoid two persons with same initials having the same avatar!

Random with font color depending on background color (so it's readable and pretty) would be even better :)

I love the idea! It's added to my todo :D

Ut stores the avatars on the server, cached by all parameters (not the name, but the generated initials) to avoid generating them again. Also some response headers are set to ask browsers to cache the response. I would also recommend users of this to download the avatars, as you suggested, especially to ensure fastest possible response rates.

Actually there is no rate limiting, but seeing just how many visitors this HN post has gotten, I may have to add some sort of limiting.

I haven't really figured exactly what I'm going to do regarding limiting and servers. Currently I'm setting up servers in each region my provider supports, to fix latency issues, and spread the load

Pretty neat but it seems the letters do not line up correctly. In such a small space any slight misalignment is really obvious.

I noticed the <Margin on the left is 16px, on the right is 17px. Similarly from the top is 21px and the bottom is 20px. It makes it look really off (to me).

https://i.imgur.com/NzZ429q.png

Ouch, Yeah appears pretty obvious. Will add some rounding to the sizes or similar

I like using http://avatars.adorable.io/

Very nice.

Noticed that the combination of background and rounded results in a .png with a non-transparent corners.

https://ui-avatars.com/api/?background=0D8ABC&rounded=true

It’s transparent to me, weird.. I’ll have to look into this. Thanks for feedback :)

Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ui-avatars

No Chinese? https://ui-avatars.com/api/?name=马云

I'm working to support Chinese as well, preferably would be support for all languages. Sadly not all fonts support each character so I've been resorting to use different fonts for different unicode scripts :)

Props for supporting Greek out of the box.

Thanks! :) hoping to support everything possible

Chinese support has been added, good catch! I actually thought I had it covered.

However due to caching, the request above will not work before tomorrow. You will have to input another name. I apologize.

I may clear the image cache later today just to fix any issues related to this.

Newly cached example: https://ui-avatars.com/api/?name=%E9%A9%AC%E4%BA%91%E9%A9%AC...

Well.. my copy paste didn't work! :(

Thanks of adding this!:D

https://ui-avatars.com/api/?name=马云马云&length=4 Maybe this works?

Anyway, actually one could add &no-cache and it would ignore cache, I forgot that part

SVG is good. SVG is well-supported, though for the oldest browsers you’d still want PNG. Server-side user-agent detection would work fine for that.

Honest question, is anyone building new apps and actually care about older browsers? We’re using svg for everything now and haven’t run into a problem with support.

That could also just be done with client local JavaScript, with much less chance of downtime or service load time...

i'm stuck generating avatars server-side in java - anyone know of a good package ?

Others pointed out doing it with css works fine.

You could also just generate inline SVG in the html, something like this: https://jsfiddle.net/8tfjqjmy/

i don't control the client (html or javascript) - i'm reimplementing the server side api

so i need to generate the avatar on the server side as a jpeg

Hmm. The jpeg requirement seems odd. Even if it has "jpg" in the url, you can serve up a standalone SVG (with a jpg extension in the url) as long as you send the right MIME type. The example SVG above shows it's probably going to be lighter weight than pulling in a java image library.

I love you for creating this.

I’m so glad to hear such feedback! Thanks!

Awesome!

Thank you! :)

Hat tip to the evil growth marketing technique (source long lost, sorry) suggesting use of a default female "outline" avatar to strongly motivate account creation / gender reassignment (and perhaps even replacement with genuine profile pictures)!

Edit: Twitter recently discussed changing default avatars, in part because their default was often left in place as "fun and cute": https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/...

My main point was that default avatars can drive sign-ups motivated primarily just to change it.

I'm a little sad that I didn't do this

Now I see why the top of https://giphy.com/gifs/homer-simpson-the-simpsons-bush-4pMX5... and it made me click it

.. I still don't get it :D

Oh, the avatar is a girl

What is this referring to?

Not heard of it before, but my interpretation is:

For a service where the early adopters are predominantly male (perhaps an invalid assumption, but a lazy tech stereotype), you have the default picture be the outline of a female to incentivise the male to "correct" the default by uploading their own picture (demonstrating they're a male, rather than female).

Interesting thought process if my interpretation is correct.

Wow, I expected something else. That is actually interesting!

And/or that the service seems to have more female participants?

The OP was referring to an "evil growth marketing tactic" - it wouldn't be as evil if it were mainly for empathy with the user base rather than as a dark pattern.

I'm just guessing but maybe that if I see a female avatar for my profile I may be motivated to change it with my own profile image? not sure though.

In regard to latest edit with Twitter

I think it's interesting how much thought goes into default avatars, and that it can be used as a marketing tactic. Thanks for providing link to Twitter as well. Guess I'll have to think more about it in the future.

Could analyse any name/username given to determine most likely gender and set it to the opposite.

Absolutely, I've played around with this. There are tons of open source libraries to determine gender from name. Obviously it cannot be 100% correct, but it can provide a guess

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but isn't this just an API that draws two letters inside a circle?

Why is this at the top of HN and receiving such accolades? It's neither interesting nor technically challenging.

Am I just missing the satire here?

I dont get it either :) Yes, that’s basically all it does.

I don’t think theres anything to it

However interest is subjective, and it’s obviously interesting to some, considering the traction it’s gotten.

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