Thomas Pfeiffer came up with "stealing" the idea of displaying a colored square with a letter that relates to the name instead of the same dummy avatar picture for people with no picture in our applications (e.g. mail). I can do squares with color and a letter in it. What I can not do is deciding on a color pallet that looks good and preferably also works nicely with breeze. That's where you come in. Can you give me a set of beautiful colors to work with?

Do you have a different idea on how to replace the dummy avatar picture? Share it!
It would be nice if you could distinguish us by having better design ideas instead of just coping what works great.

Cheers

M.

Let's provide a bit more context here
The situation is the following: We'd like to make more use of avatars for contacts in PIM applications such as email. For example, an avatar / profile picture would be shown next to each email in the inbox. The advantage is that an image is faster to recognize than a name.
That works fine with contacts from whom we have pictures. Thanks to KPeople's ability to merge contacts from different sources, we can get many contact pictures for example from Facebook, but there are likely to still be many contacts for whom we don't have a picture. Now if we just use a generic picture for all of them, the advantage of easy recognizeability is lost. Therefore we need a way to automatically generate ideally unique pictures for all contacts that don't have one associated yet.
Gmail's way of doing this is using the initial of the name with a unique background color.
We could either use that method as well (then we'd just need to provide a palette with enough colors so even many contacts with the same initial can still each have individual colors), or come up with our own method for creating unique pictures.

in the kindergarden every child has there own Symbol because it is easier for everyone.

andreas_k wrote:in the kindergarden every child has there own Symbol because it is easier for everyone.

yes. we are looking for a way to generate those symbols automatically when there is no symbol/picture assigned.
Do you have an idea that relates to kindergarden? I would very much like to hear it.

the favorit symbols are animals and homework things like hammer umbrella, ...

i'd start with animals from open clipboard in different colors and something for the name.

mbohlender wrote:What I can not do is deciding on a color pallet that looks good and preferably also works nicely with breeze. That's where you come in. Can you give me a set of beautiful colors to work with?

For the colors you can use the colors from the mimetype breeze icons (https://github.com/NitruxSA/plasma-next ... file-types). Now only a smale icons are finished, in total there are about 290 icons. So there should be enough colors.

one questions whould be what the avatar should say.

- name
- User you write often or first mail
- mail account (friend@gmail.com, friend@gmx.net)
- male / female
- country
- ...

andreas_k wrote:For the colors you can use the colors from the mimetype breeze icons (https://github.com/NitruxSA/plasma-next ... file-types). Now only a smale icons are finished, in total there are about 290 icons. So there should be enough colors.

Using the mimetype colors is a great idea in my opinion. I would prefer a list instead of picking the colors out of the icons by hand. Do we have such a list? We had one for oxygen: https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Oxyge ... olor_Usage

https://github.com/NitruxSA/plasma-next ... -in-Breeze
https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG/Color
http://flatuicolors.com/

Thanks Andreas
That is exactly what I was looking for.

Playing devils advocate: What would such approach actually get you?

The system indeed works great in googles "conversation view" to individualize the conversation members.
Every user gets a color (like eg. on IRC) and in addition a letter (helps with disambiguation - humans suck when it comes to separate 255,0,0 from 254,0,0
This makes it simpler to structure the conversation, but only works in this particular context.

If you turn this into a "long term" representation, you'll sooner or later run into a collision.
Eg. assuming you're gonna use 8 colors: i've more than 8 contacts that start with a,b,c,d,... (otoh, 8 is fully sufficient for "x" or "y"
Even if you use 16 colors, i've certainly more than 16 contacts and might end up in a discussion w/ 4 blue ppl - two of them starting with a "b".

If you've a common "anonymous" icon for everybody, it's pretty much clear that "you lack a picture, please read the name".
If you however introduce a pseudo-disambiguation - that can easily fail in a particular context - you might even introduce more confusion, yesno?

So, such generic avatar should probably be unique for every user, but while 16*26=416 sounds like very sufficient for the majority of cases, the leading character of a name is anything but evenly distributed (and notice that 16 distinct colors is likely the upper limit for detection - unlike comparism)
The last aspect is that a huge part of your brain does *nothing* but detecting faces. It's not comparable to learning "green+M is Michael".

So, unless you want contextual flagging (the google/irc case), i'm frankly not sure about the benefit of this approach (sorry. really, since I lack a better idea as well)

Thanks for playing the devils advocate.
You are absolutely right. The goal is more aesthetic then functional. Ideally we will get an avatar from any of the sources an email account is linked to. (I have to talk with the kpeople people about this). If we do not have one, we would like to display something more pretty than a default avatar picture. The goal is not to have a "long term" representation but a short term replacement. There will be cases where it becomes a long term representation though.

By the way, I am currently doing this avatar stuff for an email client that might get a conversation view.

luebking when I was thinking about the idea I can say you have right, so let's make it better.

An avatar is nicer than a missing icon symbol and maybe we can make the generic avatar also useful. A lot of people don't have an avatar also in gmail, ... because they to write mails.

Problem:
- for every user one individual avatar.

I have 300 addresses (with more than only mail address) in my address book and than there are these address book where only the mail addresses are listed when I wrote mails or get mails.

what would be cool and for the user useful:
- sorted the addresses by count. so you get your favorite contacts. every favorite contact get a colour background, a symbol and the initials (favorite = first x users and users with more than 5 % of the mail volume, ...) In addition the user can select contacts as favorit contacts manually (star symbol at the address book)
- when I get mails in job it would be nice to have the company icon in the avatar (friend@kde.com -> company = kde.com -> internet serach for kde.com -> icon from the webpage -> this icon you can use for the avatar)
- when the users are in the address book, but not at the favorite contacts the users get a colour, but no symbol and the colour are more decent.
- when you only have the mail address and the mail address is not at the favorite contacts the avatar colour is gray.

so be inspired and make this stuff usefull.

it this thread closed?



thirst is a favorit contact with star for favorit (top on the right) and symbol (bottom left)
second is contact from the adress book (book top on the right) and company icon (is from the adress book), color is 70% transparent from the breeze color.
third only mail adress not from the adress book (every adress is gray)

andreas_k wrote:it this thread closed?

Sorry. I got my color palette so I considered it solved for me. I will reopen it for discussing alternatives.