Icons

Create cool default avatars

1258 days

by alex in Graphic Design, Icons, Photoshop, Web-related

If you are designing a website where users can register and have avatars, and you want them to have those cool "Human shape" avatars as default, well, here is how to do them

This are some avatars I've created for my websites:

How to do this

I recommend using a small size, 100x100 is best for me, although any size will do. Chose two colors that will suit your design, I usually chose a lighter color for the bg of the avatar and a dark one (The same as the font color will do) for the inner shape.

So go ahead and fill in the bg of our avatar with the bg color. Now its time to get that shape. You could draw yours, although I don't recommend this, there are enough resources in Internet to have to create another.
I used a free PNG icon gallery in ArubaMaps. I really like it, it has some good quality, big PNG icons.
Go to the category Creatures, and search for people's faces.
Of course you can use anything else other that faces, but I guess I like the look of the human shape as avatar.

Now you can simply drag and drop the image in Photoshop, copy it and paste into the document, press Control+Click over the layer thumbnail to select its contents, and fill with the darker color in a layer above. Then delete the layer containing the image and position your shape.
You can improve this by using some fades and stuff like that, but that is up to you.

avatar custom default

Best free icons

1407 days

by alex in Graphic Design, Icons, Layout/Styling, Web-related

This is my list of the best free icon services around, all with a preview and a description

To visit just click on the title or in the image. Most of the icon sets below are both in png and ico formats, and the download page can be found within the preview page in most of the times.