ⵙintroduction

glorpies is an open-source avatar library. It turns any string into a hand-painted alien in watercolour and dip pen: antennae, extra eyes, horns, halos, too many teeth. The same string always gives the same face, in every browser and on every server, and the faces are alive: they breathe, blink and glance around.

why glorpies

Every user, bot and agent in your app gets a face that's recognisably theirs, built from the id you already have.

• Nothing to store. A name hashes to one of 9,007,199,254,740,992 seeds, and the seed decides everything. No database, no uploads, no API.
• Every framework. Components for React, Vue, Svelte, Solid and Preact; a web component for Angular, Astro and plain HTML; image files from a server route; a CLI.
• 29 looks. 21 paintings for faces shown large, and 8 avatar looks that hold up at 16px.
• Light. No runtime dependencies. Faces paint when they near the viewport and share one animation loop.
• Moods for agents. Six states put an agent's status on its face: idle, thinking, working, waiting, blocked, done.

what it's for

• User avatars. A face for every account from its id or email, and a fallback while a photo loads, when it fails, or when there isn't one (<Avatar>).
• AI agents and bots. Each agent is recognisable in a crowded sidebar, and its state shows what it's doing.
• Chat, comments and multiplayer. Every participant, cursor and commenter gets a face, guests included.
• Anonymous users. A face from a session id, with nothing to sign up for.
• Placeholders. Seed data, demos and design mocks with real-looking people instead of grey circles.
• Emails, link previews and READMEs. PNG, WebP, SVG and looping GIFs from your own route or the CLI.

how it works

The name is hashed to a 53-bit seed. The seed drives a deterministic random stream that builds the alien as a list of drawing operations: glazes, hatching, pen lines and fills. That list is painted in the look you choose, and the eyes are drawn live on top. Watch one being painted.

open source

glorpies is MIT licensed, and the code is on GitHub. Issues and pull requests are welcome; read the contributing guide first.