Avatar / Initials Generator

When a user has not uploaded a photo, an initials avatar is the clean fallback you see across Gmail, Slack, and most dashboards. This generator makes one from any name — extracting the initials and drawing them on a colored shape — and exports it as a PNG or SVG.

Type a name and it pulls the initials automatically: the first letter of the first and last words, or the first two letters of a single name. You choose a circle, square, or squircle (a rounded square with an adjustable corner radius), set the font size, and pick background and text colors, with a row of preset colors for quick starts. It draws everything on an HTML5 canvas, and rebuilds an equivalent vector when you export SVG.

Developers seeding placeholder user accounts, teams making consistent profile images, and designers mocking up a contact list use it to produce sharp, on-brand avatars without opening a graphics app. Export PNG for immediate use or SVG when you need it to scale crisply at any size.

The avatar is drawn onto a canvas from your chosen options and exported as a PNG. Everything happens locally — nothing is uploaded and no account is involved, so the resulting image is yours to use without any attribution requirement or usage tracking.

PNG is the right output for this because avatars need clean edges and often transparency, both of which JPEG handles badly. The file is larger than a JPEG of the same dimensions, which is immaterial at avatar sizes.

Generated avatars are genuinely useful where a real photograph is unwanted: placeholder users in a design, test accounts, forum identities, or simply not wishing to show your face.

Almost every platform masks avatars to a circle, which removes the corners of your square image. Anything you care about belongs in the central circular area, and a design that fills the square edge to edge will lose parts of itself. Testing by imagining a circle inscribed in the image is enough to catch most problems.

Scale is the other constraint. Avatars appear at 24 to 48 pixels in most lists and comment threads, so the design has to work at thumbnail size — which means high contrast, few elements, and no small text. A design that is charming at 512 pixels and mud at 32 has failed at the size that matters.

Two practical notes. Consistency across platforms is worth more than optimisation for one: using the same avatar everywhere is how people recognise you, and changing it frequently undoes that. And upload at a reasonably large size even though it displays small, since platforms generate their own thumbnails and starting from a larger source gives better results than starting from a 32-pixel file.