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Interesting point. Wavatars are Shamus Young's original work.[1] Identicons[2] and monsterids[3] are Scott Sherill-Mix's work. I don't think those guys were sho

Interesting point. Wavatars are Shamus Young's original work.[1] Identicons[2] and monsterids[3] are Scott Sherill-Mix's work. I don't think those guys were shooting for "ugly", but I agree an ugly or nondescript avatar could incentivize users to upload a custom one. And that may have played into Gravatar's decision to support these avatar types. [1] http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1462 http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1462 [2] http://scott.sherrillmix.com/blog/blogger/wp_identicon/ http://scott.sherrillmix.com/blog/blogger/wp_identicon/ [3] http://scott.sherrillmix.com/blog/blogger/wp_monsterid/ http://scott.sherrillmix.com/blog/blogger/wp_monsterid/

grok1fy 15y ago
Minor correction: Identicons were created by Don Park who open sourced a Java implementation. Scott adapted it for WordPress and gives credit to Don credit for the idea in your link[2]: "A couple weeks ago I made a WordPress plugin to generate unique monsters for each commenter. Don Park came up with the original idea for representing users with geometric shapes. Since I already had the framework in place I thought I’d make a WordPress plugin for the original geometric Identicons."