How many times have you signed up for a service, and whenever you log in you’re greeted with a blank image icon? There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to include images of yourself all over the web (even if you do look incredible). Well Boring Avatars have come up with a solution, a tiny JavaScript React library that generates custom, SVG-based, round avatars from any username and colour palette - thoroughly customisable and aesthetically pleasing.

Although this service is very customisable, there isn’t a great deal to it. Which is ideal really, no need to over-egg the avatarial pudding. Immediately upon accessing the site, Boring Avatars has several quirks that catch the eye, the first for us was that all of the template designs are named after notable women, and each basic design differs slightly from the one next to it. Our personal favourite for testing out the tool was Betty Ford. Displayed at the top left of the screen are six words: Marble, Beam, Pixel, Sunset, Bauhaus and Ring. These are the differing avatar styles. Next to these are five colours that follow the typical hex colour-wheel customisation. These five colours are used to build your designs. Now you have your understanding and tools you need, start designing! 

As mentioned, the avatars you create are all .svg file types, and each design needs to be copied from the site in Figma. Although this is of course an ideal format for this service, it’s fairly limiting. We would like it if you could download for .jpg or .png files just for ease’s sake! But this is nitpicking. If you aren’t feeling especially creative on the day, you can click the Random Palette button in the top right and let the colour schemes fall as they do, you never know what you might find. 

We like Boring Avatars, it’s purely customisable but strangely formatted, almost rigid, which means you never stray too far from what you need. Boring Avatars have curated a perfectly catered library to let you build up something unique to you, let your personality shine out without giving too much of your personal data away! Other than the lack of choice in image types, it’s a good service, it’s something a lot of people probably didn’t know they wanted, or even needed. 

Boring Avatars, this is a smart little tool. You get 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼/5!