seedkin

One seed. A whole family.

Seedkin turns any string into a pixel avatar, the same one every time, on any machine, with nothing stored. Plant a user id and a robot sprouts, or an animal, a person or a monster. Type anything to meet your kin.

Where they come from

Under every app there's a field of dots called the Grid, fifteen across and fifteen down, waiting. Drop a seed into it, a name, an id, any string at all, and something sprouts. The Grid never forgets a seed, so the same one always grows the same seedkin, cell for cell.

Nobody planted the Grid. It was just there, the way a lawn is there, and things kept coming up.

The families

Quick start

Install

npm install seedkin

Draw one

import { botling } from 'seedkin/botling';

const svg = botling(user.id);

Read the docs

What people use them for

  • Profile pictures for everyone who hasn't uploaded one, so a new account never looks empty.
  • Comment threads and chat, where a face tells people apart at a glance, even at 24px.
  • Players and bots in games, leaderboards and dashboards.
  • Placeholders for projects, teams and repos: seed with the name and it's done.

Free and open source

Seedkin is MIT licensed, art included, so you can use it anywhere, commercial or not. It has no dependencies, makes no requests and returns an SVG string, so it runs in the browser, on the server and at the edge, under a strict CSP. The source is on GitHub.