A Primer On Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) For Your Website

The power and popularity of SVG as a format for images on websites are both owed to its ability to express clean and visually striking aesthetic elements within mere lines of code. Scalable Vector Graphics do not require the client to wait until self-contained images fully transfer over from the server side, and those images do not become grainy when magnified within the browser. Furthermore, the code that constitutes an SVG image's digital makeup can be dynamically influenced by other pieces of code within the website's infrastructure, allowing for a wide range of user interactivity that would have required large files in the early 2010s.

The website at boringavatars.com offers a creative take on letting the user adjust the parameters of an SVG image before saving the finalized block of code for themselves. It presents a dynamically generated set of circular SVG images that could hypothetically be used as avatars on forum posts, and each image can be preserved by the user by copying to the clipboard the SVG code currently making it up. The structure of the contents within each circle is partially dictated by the menu at the upper-left corner, which allows the user to select appearances such as "marble" and "pixel." Meanwhile, the five colors making up the color palette shared between all of the circular avatars can either be randomized or selected individually.

The particular twist employed by this avatar-creation program is that every avatar's arrangement of elements is also influenced by a corresponding name. There is no significance to the fact that all of the names displayed as examples on the site are either celebrities or historical figures; similar patterns would result even if scrambled gibberish were used instead. The only significance of an avatar's corresponding "name" is that the text string's contents are technically parsed by the program to derive values that get plugged into internal parameters. This works similarly to programs that would generate the exact same "random result" every time if the user is allowed to input a particular "seed value" and repeatedly initiate the generation process without changing that value. For more information click here https://boringavatars.com/.