Swasticons
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@thecreativeone91's avatar looks like a swastika, as a Jewish person I am offended:
Not really.
Actually this is a common problem with four frame identicons. That's right, they're called identicons, lol Web 2.0.
Probably the worst algorithm is the, at one time, most implemented open source one:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/identicons/
I started with this one myself and noticed while some only slightly resemble swastikas like @thecreativeone91's though some are so blatant to where it's as if they were made for a white supremacist. This is still a common problem regardless of implementation software:
https://www.google.ae/search?q=identicons+swastikas
This happens because, as described above, there's an issue with how most people do this. Typically they draw a box in some random or algorithmically defined way, then rotate it 3 more times to create 4 frames. Of course, one could not rotate them, and this was my first attempt at a fix, but weirdly enough it still happens, albeit slightly less often.
Instead the best thing to do is to either create 4 or more random frames within your image, which is pretty intensive (but if you cache it, not a big deal) or what I did was generate 2 or 3 (based on the algorithm) and randomly rotate those to create 8 frames. Believe it or not my solution still sometimes creates things which slightly resemble swastikas, but it's far better than a lot of the solutions out there.
Additionally there's a pretty good solution for WordPress:
http://scott.sherrillmix.com/blog/blogger/wp_identicon/
It's still neat though and can give some insight into alternative ways to do it than how most open source methods do it, i.e. how to not create swastikas.
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Mine was generated by gravitar. Anyway it just looked like a X type shape to me.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Mine was generated by gravitar. Anyway it just looked like a X type shape to me.
That's exactly what I expected a closet anti-semite to say!
Actually gravatar is usually pretty good at generating icons which don't look like swastikas. They're certainly better than any open source option I've seen yet, at least for PHP.
