We need a lot of avatars with animals in the same style. How to do, tell me interesting options?

Question

Images

Good afternoon.

There is a project in which one of the main features is the lack of registration. Accordingly, there are no profiles, no possibility to choose a nickname, etc. When communicating, users are randomly given names of the form: Dazzling Duck, Lucky Lemur, Humorous Hedgehog (idea borrowed from Ubuntu Release Codenames).

All this is quite simple and cool, but when a lot of people participate in the dialogue, it becomes inconvenient to navigate by names alone. I would like to add avatars to the names, but so far we have not come up with a good way to make many avatars in the same style.

Drawing/ordering is too complicated and time consuming. Adding 20 more names to the site is half an hour of work, but drawing 20 avatars for them is much longer.

Using ready-made sets of icons or clipart is difficult, because in any set there are far from all the animals that are used in names.

Using photos to create avatars is already the best option, but photos contain a lot of detail, and avatars should be simple images (even animal silhouettes will suffice). Maybe there are some interesting photo manipulation techniques / photoshop filters that can help here?

In general, we are looking for a simple and beautiful solution, something as cool as Identicon or OpenID mutants . I will be glad to any ideas about this, interesting links and other things :)

PS: Here is an example of a page with a dialogue: weegle.ru/events/show/1029/

Answer 1

Here, there is another option that I somehow missed: animal character fonts .

Answer 2

There is a good tool for batch work with graphics. Only it is unlikely that everything will be done quickly so that you are satisfied.

Answer 3

sourceforge.net/projects/identicons/
Here is an implementation of Identicons in PHP, I think it will fit your project.

Answer 4

Look for icon sets on some iconfinder.com and make avatars out of them.

Answer 5

Will you also have Depressed Ferret?