Lots of people are remaking their avatars for various social networks with a green tint to show their support for the Iranian election protests. This is awesome, but it also causes people’s icons to be visually difficult to distinguish. I get that some people may feel like that’s the point (we’re all together, one voice, etc.), but I find it distracting in practice. So I decided to make my avatar with a green border instead:
If you like this approach, it’s easy to use Flickr’s photo editing tools to make a similar avatar. Here are the steps:
- Upload an avatar to Flickr and navigate to its page. Take note of the image’s original width and height.
- Click the ‘Edit Photo’ link
- When Picnik opens, click the ‘Create’ tab
- Click the ‘Frames’ option on the row of links immediately below the ‘Create’ tab
- Click the ‘Border’ option on the left hand row of options
- Click the box next to ‘Outer Color’ and paste in ‘00C100′ without quotes where ‘000000′ is
- Adjust the ‘Outer Thickness’ slider to whatever thickness you prefer (for my 80×80 icon, I set it to 8 )
- Adjust the ‘Inner Thickness’ slider to 0
- Click ‘Apply’
- Click the ‘Edit’ tab near the top of the page
- Click the ‘Resize’ button under the ‘Edit’ tab
- Enter the image’s original dimensions, then click ‘OK’
- In the upper righthand corner of the screen, click Save.
- In the ‘Save this photo’ pop-up window, click ‘Save’ again.
- From the photo’s page, click ‘All Sizes’
- If it is not displaying the ‘Original’ size, click the ‘Original’ link.
- Right click on the image and save it to your hard drive.
If you don’t like my approach and would prefer to do it the way everyone else is, that’s ok too. You can visit helpiranelection.com and add a green tint to your avatar. In one or two steps.
You can also go to http://www.avatint.com to change any avatar to any color to show support or protest.
June 20th, 2009 at 9:58 pm