Pixel art avatar generator, over 40 million images

Hello, residents and guests of the Habr.
I want to share with you one interesting tool. Our team developed it during the project, which I will tell you more. Pixel man on KDPV - the result of his work.

We were not too lazy to sit with a calculator and calculated the approximate number of possible images. Got a number of just over forty million. Therefore, everyone can choose something to their taste. There are enough pictures for everyone!

So, meet 8biticon.com . Free, open and easy to use avatar generator.

Under the cut is a story, description and some technical information.

A bit of history

Most often, when registering on the site, especially if it is not a social network, a situation arises when many users have stub images instead of profile pictures:



I think everyone will agree that this is not very convenient, and visually finding the right person in the list and finding out much harder. This problem has existed before, and various projects have solved it in their own way. The closest and most popular to us was, of course, stackoverflow.com . In their case, a randomly generated picture is issued during registration. For example, this:



This somewhat simplifies the task of visual identification, but not much. It was decided to go in this direction. But still create something more humanoid. Having tried a dozen options, we came to the generation of avatars with eight-bit faces.

What came of this?

The principle of operation is quite simple:



Pre-prepared images-patterns in random or necessary order are superimposed on each other, after which the server script glues them together, and at the output we have the treasured userpic. The picture can be downloaded, can be set as an avatar, if the script is built into the site.

On the 8biticon website , we deployed the application from our own sources, which are published on github , and added the ability to quickly install avatars in social networks. To begin with, we chose the most popular vk.com and Facebook in our latitudes.

At the moment, the server part is implemented as a django-app, so those who use this framework can easily integrate 8biticon into a finished or new project.

And an example of using the constructor in the wild can be found on the website, for the sake of which everything was started: studyjam.net

What plans do you have for the future?

In addition to drawing new patterns, development plans include the creation of a full-fledged open-source project with support for various server platforms. Well, most likely, add such fashionable whistles as photo filters these days :-)

This resource was made just for fun. Therefore, everyone who wants to make the world a little more fun and convenient, we invite you to take part in it. Programmers, designers and just those who have a desire.
And it’s always nice to see any of your suggestions and comments.

UPD The site is functioning again, we apologize for the technical problems.