Show HN: SquareFaceIcon – a tiny "protocol" for consistent square avatars

SquareFaceIcon is a super–simple “avatar protocol” plus a free web tool for generating consistent square face icons: https://squarefaceicon.top/ https://squarefaceicon.top/ Instead of every product/team reinventing avatar styles, SquareFaceIcon treats a face icon as a tiny, structured “packet”: - fixed square canvas - a small set of discrete layers (skin, hair, eyes, mouth, extras, background) - finite, enumerable options per layer (IDs instead of pixels) That gives you: - *Deterministic avatars from a tiny config* – you can describe an avatar with a short JSON (or even a few bytes), then render it anywhere the “protocol” is implemented. No binary image assets needed. - *Consistent visual language* – all combinations obey the same square-face “grammar”, so a community, product, or game can have hundreds of unique avatars that still look like one family. - *Cheap to store and send* – configs can live in your DB/user table, be generated from a hash, or passed in URLs, then rendered on the client. The hosted generator at squarefaceicon.top is one reference implementation: - 200+ pre-defined parts across multiple categories. - Pure HTML5/JS, runs fully in the browser, no sign-in and no server-side image processing. - Exports transparent PNGs in multiple sizes (64–512px) for Discord, forums, games, etc. Why this might be useful: - Small apps or side projects get a drop-in avatar system without dealing with uploads, moderation, or external CDNs. - Communities can standardize on a simple avatar spec and still let users fully customize their look. - Devs can re-implement the renderer in any stack (Canvas/WebGL/SVG/native) as long as they respect the same part IDs and layout rules. If folks are interested, happy to: - document the “protocol” more formally (schema for the avatar config) - publish a minimal open-source renderer - add an API for server-side generation Feedback welcome on: - what you’d want from such a tiny avatar “protocol” (versioning? theming? accessories?) - whether you’d use this in a product, and what integrations you’d need (React/Vue components, game engines, etc.)