I built picotile — type a name, get a unique dithered dot avatar (deterministic, zero dependencies)

Soheil Fouladvandi — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:55:15 +0000

Live demo: Live demo
Github: Code

I kept noticing that most identicon libraries produce kind of forgettable avatars, so I made one with a look I actually like. picotile takes a name and a seed and returns a two-tone dithered dot tile. The same name always produces the exact same avatar, so you can generate user avatars on the fly without storing any images.

The pattern comes from ordered (Bayer) dithering — dense areas fill into solid shapes, sparse areas fade out, with a clean half-tone band in between. There are four shapes it can take: linear, radial, sweep, and ripple.

Some bits I'm happy with:

Zero dependencies, works in Node or the browser, TypeScript
Output is just an SVG string, so it works server-side or at build time
There's a CLI: npx picotile "Ada Lovelace"
You can pull the raw dot coordinates and render them however you want

It's one of my first published npm packages, so I'd really appreciate honest feedback — on the code, the docs, or just whether the avatars look good to you.

DEV Community: Soheil Fouladvandi

I built picotile — type a name, get a unique dithered dot avatar (deterministic, zero dependencies)