"Boring avatars is a tiny JavaScript React library that generates custom, SVG-based, round avatars from any username and color palette."
sigh. Still hate that Twitter switched to round avatars. Too limiting.
Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars
81–90 of 99 posts
Re: Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars
#82Why make a library dependent on a particular framework? Seems to just limit usefulness for no particular gain.
If I create a library I would usually make it to solve my own usecase. And if you mainly work with react-apps, and your plan is to use it in an react app. Why not also make the library in react? 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…
Why put it on GitHub and a web page if you don't care about other people's use cases?
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.
Re: Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
"When you are accustomed to privilege, equality can feel like oppression." Stephanie Herrera
But has the concept been producing positive results?
It did in this case. Nobody would have batted an eyelash if they had gone with, say, US Presidents, a list which excludes women.
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.
Re: Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because they like the syntax? Because it has a nice way of passing properties? Because you can work with pseudo-DOM elements? It's all open source. If you want a vanilla js implementation go ahead.
I find it a bit sad that the most upvoted reaction to someone's cool little project they wanted to share is the classic HN misguided and overused response of 'React BAD'
I don't think anyone's saying React is bad, they're saying it's weird that this library depends on it.
Re: Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just a list of notable women. It's not really "excluding men" as much as it is just a different category.
Exactly. Separate but equal.
While not talking about men mathematically excludes them, or logically excludes sets of men, in everyday life this is merely an incidence where men, or famous men, are just not the subject.
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.
Re: Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars
#86"Boring avatars is a tiny JavaScript React library that generates custom, SVG-based, round avatars from any username and color palette."
sigh. Still hate that Twitter switched to round avatars. Too limiting.
Like round tables often do, they don't use all the space they take up. It could just be a personal pet peeve.
But I still like this project.
Re: Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars
#87They look cool but aren't avatars mainly used to uniquely identify someone based on a picture? A 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.
There are only 676 unique 2 letter pairs or 17.5k 3 letter letter initial triplets, and initials aren’t evenly distributed so there’s a ton of non-uniqueness in that approach for a platform with millions of users.
Plus 16.7 million RGB colors, making for quite a few combinations (somewhere around 230 billion).
Re: Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars
#88They look cool but aren't avatars mainly used to uniquely identify someone based on a picture? A 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.
> 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) S…
This is something I really appreciate about Faker[1], a library that generates random data to seed your development DB with. It will throw you about as many curveballs than obvious 'happy path' names, addresses, phone numbers and whatnot.
Re: Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars
#89I share the common setiment from the comments: the avatars are hard to tell apart, which means they fail in their purpose as quick visual identifiers.
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.
Re: Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are only 676 unique 2 letter pairs or 17.5k 3 letter letter initial triplets, and initials aren’t evenly distributed so there’s a ton of non-uniqueness in that approach for a platform with millions of users.
Plus 16.7 million RGB colors, making for quite a few combinations (somewhere around 230 billion).
True,but it's a bit hard to distinguish between #ffffff and #fffffe