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.
- Botling
- Snoot Preview
- Noggin Preview
- Beastie Preview
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
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Meet the Botlings Stable
The first seeds to sprout came up humming. Botlings build antennas out of nothing and blink when they think.
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Meet the Snoots Coming soon
Where the Grid ran soft and warm, Snoots came up nose first: cats, foxes, bears, bunnies, owls and the odd frog.
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Meet the Noggins Coming soon
The Grid's people. Every haircut, pair of glasses and grin a seed can grow, and no two noggins quite alike.
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Meet the Beasties Coming soon
Beasties grew in the Grid's dark corners: one eye or three, fangs, horns and wings. Friendlier than they look.
Quick start
Install
npm install seedkinSeedkin isn't on npm yet. Until it is, npm install botling draws the same robots: import from 'botling' instead.
Draw one
import { botling } from 'seedkin/botling';
const svg = botling(user.id);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.