Show HN: Personal avatar generator built in ReasonML | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Personal avatar generator built in ReasonML

personas.draftbit.com

80 pointsBrushfire19 comments

Hey Everyone! We built Personas as a side project from building Draftbit. We started down this path after looking around for a set of colorful avatar icons to use on a project, and couldn't find a set that didn't force us to make some unfortunate choices around gender, race, and age. So we built our own set, and here it is!

The site uses ReasonML to stack SVG's on top of each other, provide unique combinations of attributes. Our current set supports more than 2.5 billion possible permutations!

You can use Personas to create a new icon for slack, social media, product hunt, etc. Or use the (free) Sketch file to build a set for your products or apps, or dig into the source code on GitHub to help us improve and expand Personas for everyone. Cheers!

Didn't know you could use ReasonML w/ GatsyJS. The app is really cute kudos!

Thank you, I should have thought of including Gatsby in the headline

This is great, but I couldn't make on for myself because there is no "patchy beard" option D:

It’s open source! https://github.com/draftbit/avatar-generator

I'd consider changing the random balance on the facial hair -- with six types of facial hair and one without, and (I presume) equal weighting to those seven categories, 6 out of 7 faces come out as people able to grow beards...

Our randomize just selects between all the layers and throws them together, so everything has the same weight. We'll take a look and see if there is a straightforward way to change this.

Hey! The tool is open source: https://github.com/draftbit/avatar-generator

Would love to see you implement something more real-world. Thanks!

It's a bit odd of an odd experience clicking through "randomize". I doubt ~85% of the adult population can grow facial hair.

Great seeing more apps being built in Reason! How was your experience with it?

Hey, coder here. There's a bit of a learning curve and there were moments where I wanted to throw it out the window, but now I can't imagine life without it.

Aka, just like learning any other new language, except better.

Take that frustration, increase at least by an order of magnitude and that's your experience implementing native apps.

Still Loving it, though!

This is very cool, the idea behind draftbit sounds really interesting as well. When is the beta out?

Beta will be out soon! You can sign up for early access at https://draftbit.com

Neat little app!!! I shared on Twitter my beautiful avatar of myself. Like I said to Peter, you're making me very interested in RML! Nice work!!

Glad to hear that, thanks!!

Could you talk more about your experience with Reason? On the fence about it and Clojurescript, Elm and Purescript.

Cute.

I suggest always rendering the little shape preview above each color palette in greyscale. That way the user can still browse shapes even though they have a color selected that's hard to see on a white background.

Great Idea. Thanks.

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