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Nice work, but the "they look like they were drawn by programmers" comment makes me think you missed the point of Gravatar's specific default avatars.

They're intentionally ugly. The theory is that an ugly default avatar makes the user more likely to upload their own image.

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Interesting point. Wavatars are Shamus Young's original work.[1] Identicons[2] and monsterids[3] are Scott Sherill-Mix's work. I don't think those guys were shooting for "ugly", but I agree an ugly or nondescript avatar could incentivize users to upload a custom one. And that may have played into Gravatar's decision to support these avatar types.

[1] http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1462

[2] http://scott.sherrillmix.com/blog/blogger/wp_identicon/

[3] http://scott.sherrillmix.com/blog/blogger/wp_monsterid/

Minor correction: Identicons were created by Don Park who open sourced a Java implementation. Scott adapted it for WordPress and gives credit to Don credit for the idea in your link[2]:

"A couple weeks ago I made a WordPress plugin to generate unique monsters for each commenter. Don Park came up with the original idea for representing users with geometric shapes. Since I already had the framework in place I thought I’d make a WordPress plugin for the original geometric Identicons."

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