Avatar Generator

How to use Avatar Generator

1. Enter the name or initials.
2. Choose the colour and size.
3. Generate and download the PNG.
4. Square output; most platforms crop avatars to a circle, so keep the initials centred and away from the corners.
5. Generate at twice the display size for high-density screens.
6. Generated locally as a PNG — nothing is uploaded.

Why initials beat a generic silhouette

A default avatar that is the same grey person for everybody makes a list of users unscannable. Initials on a colour derived from the name give each person a distinct, stable marker that is recognisable at 24 pixels, which is where avatars usually live. Deriving the colour from a hash of the name rather than randomly is the important detail: the same person gets the same colour every time, on every device, with nothing stored.

Getting initials right is harder than it looks

Taking the first letter of the first and last space-separated words works for most European names and fails elsewhere. Many cultures write the family name first, some people have one name, some have four, and prefixes like van, de and bin are not initials. Non-Latin scripts have no meaningful notion of an initial at all — a single Chinese character is already the whole surname. The safest general approach is one or two characters from the start of the display name, which degrades gracefully in every case.

Contrast, at avatar size

Initials are small, so the text-to-background contrast has to be strong — 4.5:1 as a minimum, more in practice because the glyphs are tiny. A palette of mid-tone backgrounds with white text is the common solution and works because it is checkable: pick colours dark enough that white always passes, rather than generating an arbitrary hue and hoping. The same accessibility rule as anywhere else, and easier to forget on an element this small.