Last month we covered a competition being run by Romanian design crowdsourcing website Palkoo to find a new default avatar for Twitter. Well, the winner’s been selected and you know what? It might just work.
The default avatar is the image you get next to your username when you set up a new twitter account. At the moment it’s a simple, white egg but Palkoo asked designers around the world to submit their ideas for something a bit different with the bait of an $800 prize.
The winner is this rather charming blue bird, as designed by a 22 year-old Bulgarian called Alecksander. What’s particularly interesting about the winning idea is that it’s designed to be personalised to reflect a user’s personality, as you can see in the image below. While there are plenty of services out there that will generate an avatar along these lines for you, the idea of Twitter building this into the user setup process would certainly get rid of all those identikit plain egg icons out there from users who haven’t bothered to find something better yet.
Palkoo says that most entries followed the bird and egg motifs, although bubbles and quotation marks were popular additions too. Based on the entries received, the company says it concluded that Twitter should add a simple, pleasant way of showing the why a user was yet to upload a custom avatar.
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