UI Faces: Lorem Ipsum for Avatars

Once your "user submitted" images get past a certain point, it's probably better to just get random images from Google images and crop them.

As far as placeholder avatars go, I've been a huge fan of new Basecamp's avatars[1]. Now if only there was a way to procedurally generate seemingly abstract images that form face-like structures (and make an avatar out of it).

[1] https://37signals.com/svn/posts/3104-behind-the-scenes-reinv...

My first thought was "oh god this better not be random Twitter users." But it looks like you (or whoever) gets the faces with permission from the users, so it all seems okay.

All I know is I'd never give away my avatar to use on ANY site. "Hey Mitchell you were a user on a porn site?" "What?" "Yeah, blahblah.com" "Oh jesus they're just using random avatars to make the comments look real. They're fake, that's not me."

Nightmare.

There are a few avatars that I don't think gave permission - Steve Jobs, Sienfeld, etc.

as an aside: I'm looking for cute fun avatar style images, depicting fat people, in a variety of styles (photo, animated gif, cartoon, etc) under permissive licencing.

This is a potential copyright/privacy nightmare in the making. Cool idea though.

Did I just see actual dead people's avatars there ?