I like it plain. but thats a personal thing. would seem more cluttered up imo.

i like it plain too. don't you prefer the mystery Evil?

we're thinking of adding this feature to the next/upcoming version of Archinect. i'm interested to hear what more of you think about avatars.

all three of me vote yes to avatars! how long till archinect 3.0? (4.0?)

i don't think the avatars will take away from the mystery if you don't let it. it's just like screen names. some ppl are open about who they are, like paul, and others are not, like evilp.

perhaps smaller than your average messageboard avatars?...

I'd be keen on the ability to post an image/s to your profile, but they need not be high school portraits. Its a fine line though between what we have now and say myspace for example. I'd prefer people to know me through my comments not my profile.

i'm surprised to find that this is the way i feel, but i'd say no to avatars... if you chose to include them, then we'd need some sort of new idea of how to manifest them, beyond your typical concept. i'm sure many people would have good suggestions for a new avatar paradigm. perhaps one intersting thought would be to create a mosaic of most recent poster's avatars as the background/sidebar of the main forum page, updated real time. that wouldn't solve the issue of what to do on individual thread postings though.

i've never been an avatar type of person, primarily because most forums are filled with really cheesy avatars, but i think the archinect community would be capable of coming up with some creative ideas to help better distinguish each other through graphic branding.

with names like these above and the left, who needs an avatarremorre..?

So are we talking avatars as in little non/animated gif's displayed when one posts? I am a little confused by the terminology in the web-usage sense.

Paul, the next obvious step is archinect email addresses and individual webpages, but is that where you want to head?

oh everyone was so afraid of usernames and that turned out great, keep em small, 100 x 100, people here are cool, itll be fun youll see.

I think avatars would be great. In a creative community like this, there's no reason that we need to neccesarily post our pictures. It would be interesting to see what people chose to represent them- pictures of their work, their favorite art, whatever wierdness they came up with.

wouldn't it spoil the clean layout of the pages? can we limit the colors to red white and black?:)

Avatars are great, but to keep a consitant esthetic to the site, they should be somehow automatically resized to a specific format, and even "filtered" so that ther's no ugly colors (like all black and white and red, something like that...) and that the shapes are hard to recognize. a script in photoshop would do it I think. Fist crop image, then resize, then change the image to grayscale, equalize, change it back to RGB, put a red dot on the up right corner, save as GIF.

i vote no avatar!

vive la resistance!

I find animated avatars irritating. Perhaps allow only jpegs, not gifs (unless it's possible to distinguish between animated and non-animated ones).

They'd look awesome if the palette was limited, I agree :D. Shades of red and black perhaps, though I've no idea how you'd implement that. More hassle than it's worth?

If it does happen, just make sure that it's possible to toggle them off and on, so that there can't be any complaints from the minimalists...

no.

exactly.
or they'll end up looking like this...

i like richard's notion of keeping it limited to a few colors... or even monochrome. would it be possible to implement some sort of graphic filter when people upload thier avatars to convert the graphic to monochrome?

i think the size should be restricted to something very small, maybe icon size in windows, 42 pixels square.

hi all you fancy graphics lovers,

i have to vote for NO avatars.

in fact, generally speaking, the fewer the pictures the better. since i generally post while i'm "working," i find that text is much less conspicous than the "fancy graphics" of most websites...kinda of like the vodka that i hide in my cranberry juice while i'm in the office.

as nice as restricted or filtered images sound graphically, the fascist element bothers me, so if that were to be the intended direction, i'd definitely vote no. however, someone above mentioned a great idea, just simply being able to turn them on or off with your user preferences. if you want them, turn them on, if not, off.

AS a fan of mystery, I say Bring in the avatars (& BIG Text).

I agree most sites look absurd with moving gifs and this weeks favorite american idol head-shot cluttering up the margins but we could do it right, little tight boxes - oh wait...

little tight boxes sound nice. if the boxes get to large, things just get all over the place. i've seen sites like that, and let me tell you, they are not good. bad things man.

i for one do not need the fancy graphic download times to go up anymore. i also agree that it is easier to get away with archinect at work when you don't have hello kitty icons, or the inevitable nipple avatar up.

on off toggle would be nice if it goes into effect. i wouldn't care as long as the toggle was there.

I'll vote "no" for pretty much the same reasons that have already been covered - and I'm with diabase on posting an image to your user profile instead.

Speaking of new archinect, is it possible for the new version to not have logins? Because I feel that classics like the Frank Gehry fashion thread, the Cosmonaut looking for the Russian Avant Garde thread, and most importantly the thread about the guy who lost his class equipment in cement have no chance of being outdone as long as we can't be anonymous.

Graphics and images seem a natural fit considering our chosen profession. Limiting the colors doesn't seem to make sense for any particular reason. Too arbitrary. I like not seeing animated gifs as they can be distracting... Small, still images, color as you like it...

no, because then I can't open up pages while at work, i'm more likely to get busted. not that i post while at work...

they would have to be tiny, and no larger than the text on the left of the post which gives name+total entries + comments + date...

and just black, white and red sounds like a cool idea...

Avatars are OK but this site works better without. I can't stand those witty / banal quotes people associate all their posts.

I would be more interested in a threaded, respond to a specific comment type of setup than I would be in avatars.

just to confirm - if we do go with avatars, each member will be able to switch them off within their personal preferences settings. and they will be small, around 150x150 max.

archinect's colors are red, white, and shades of brown (no black), but the color scheme will most likely be changing with the next version.

maybe that would be the challenge. you have to design your avatar to appropriately fit in the context of the website. lest ye be scoffed at by everyone else. it's like site constraints.

but I agree with strawbeary. i like this forum cause it's clean. and i can view it at work and it doesn't look like a forum. but i wouldn't ever do that.

no avatars in the discussion forums, etc. for most of the reason's listed above, though I think having them in the profile would be fine.

I'm going to weigh in and say.....I actually don't have an opinion on the avatars. Could take them or leave them. If we had them, I would probably put one up.

I am interested, however, in having completely arbitrary ranking systems with associated titles. You know, to discern the regulars from the tourists. Something like "intern" for people under 50 posts and "Brad Pitt" for people 100-500. Maybe work "Captain Craft" in there somewhere. :o)

I'm only half kidding.

Ha, WonderK, I love it!

The tourists are buggin' me lately...

As for avatars, I like the suggestion of putting them on the profile pages - I wish people would put more info on the profiles pages, very few of us do and I enjoy it when I can learn more abot the posters whose comments I love, or hate.

wonderK - what if they were completely random.. i.e. fark on april first every year. So for one post someone may be labeled "Zaha's Ass Hair" and "Baby Harp Seal" the next.
this of course would probably become fairly annoying after the first few post... but maybe not.
*shrug*

you could always have "god the architect" for the top level contributors.

sad part is, Per would have god status due to his posts alone on his own thread.

hell, give god the architect status to paul and the editors as a special deal.

if we do have them, i like the size driftwood has posted above. and please god no quotes, those should definately be saved for the profiles pages.

I think avatars are fine, especially if you can turn them on/off. Over on yayhooray our avatars are only 16x16, which is suprisingly plenty of space.

agreed sigs are annoying and useless.

i'm not interested in little acid tabs next to people's names.

javier, i am cracking up..

i like how fast archinect is......i like avatars but theyd have to be small to keep the pages fast

avatar, shamavatar!

between me and google, I like it minimal...

save your avatar for somewhere else.

(if we go to avatars, I have a great one!!!!)

architecturegeek, I'm still cracking up. "Zaha's ass hair", that would be a pretty high rank, lol.

keep the existing format, or even better... minimize it further. that'd be feckin hot

i'm with meliason--if I see one fucking dancing crack-head chapelle or will ferrel i'm off archinect for good. please change nothing, or simplify further.