In a recent project, I had to assign a unique header to a couple of pages. I am a crappy artist, so I decided to have these images auto-generated. Each image is generated using a seed, which is used to create a random number generator. With this random number generator, a large number of decisions are made to lay out a tiling pattern, distort and color it.
PanAvatar could be made to generate avatars. Not just for users, but also for articles, clients, case-files, and any other model you may have.
Just use pip install panavatar.
If you're using django, add this to your urls:
urlpatterns = [
url(r'^panavatar/', include("panavatar.urls")),
]This will add two urls to your website : yourdomain/panavatar/<width>x<height>.svg and yourdomain/panavatar/<width>x<height>/<seed>.svg.
Outside of django you can use panavatar.get_svg(width, height, parameters) to get an SVG. Parameters is a dict with (optionally) the seed in a 'seed' member. The other paramaters are undocumented for now.
In your template you can call these urls with : {% url 'bg' width=1920 height=300 %} or {% url 'bg' width=1920 height=300 seed="myseed" %}
And for example you can use it with inline styling like this :
<div style="background-image: url({% url 'bg' width=1920 height=300 seed="myseed" %})">I'll be using semantic versioning. Seeds will produce similar results within a major version, and identical results within a minor version. Of course, the 0.* versions carry no guarantee whatsoever.
Feel free to add issues, pull requests, or fork this and build your own.