icon self- and other-identification

[cimorene]

On social media it's well-known that we associate our friends with their default icons (I've been party to plenty of amusing conversations about friends who look like animals or specific celebrities for this reason - my favorite was cleolinda because for a while basically all of her icons were Galadriel, but they were DIFFERENT icons of Galadriel, which really facilitates picturing her just as Galadriel IN GENERAL and not as, like, a specific image of Galadriel. Made it a more detailed imaginary identity.)

I don't see as much discussion of how we identify ourselves with our default icons, but I remember this coming up a bit from other people even before the death of livejournal, when fandom practice was generally to have a large number of icons for different moods/reactions, topics/fandoms, etc. Even then, I saw some people talking about how they came to feel their default icon was more of an avatar, with a personal connection.

But after a number of years, I really am too attached to my default icon to switch away, when I've thought I'd like to a couple of times.


I recently found a very nice, much cleaner and more high-res scan of it - it's a publicity photo of 1920s singer Helen Kane, who was the inspiration behind the Betty Boop character.

I've made a lot of different



variations over the years (including a MLP version and a couple of others using various avatar/'dress-up doll' generators), but I've found recently that even a color outside of the blue-green range feels weirdly artificial, as if I've dressed up for an occasion and am waiting to go back. A while ago I thought I'd like to be non-anthropomorphic, and I went to a lot of trouble to make some icons with animals from Marimekko patterns, but I couldn't use any of them. It's not that I felt I could never identify with the images, but that I couldn't get used to the idea of the switch away from this one, which just seems so drastic...

...and I feel like Tumblr makes (made... or has made) it worse, somehow?

I've gotten used to how static icons are there, and finding the range of reactions available in an icon limiting compared to all the reaction gifs and reaction images available when they're divorced from one's avatar. (I wanted to hide the icons on the posts on the main page of my blog - and let the icon at the top represent the whole thing -, but I'd have to go tinker with the style in order to hide them on my own blog but keep them on the Reading and Network pages.)

Comments

[cupidsbow]

It's funny you should mention this, because I've been thinking about it anew with having come back to DW more. One of the reasons I made my current DW icon was because I started to ask myself why all by avatars looked like not-me, specifically white men or objects. And I couldn't really think of a good reason. So I made an avatar that looked like cartoon me and made it the default. *points to icon* It's such a weird thing to have an avatar that becomes so linked to us when often we pick it in the first place for all sorts of odd reasons that get lost over time.

[linbot]

Returning to DW has surprised me a couple of times about icons too. I used to make animated icons and I was a bit surprised that after all these years they're still 100x100 pixels and 40k. My screen is so much larger now that it actually took me ages to notice that I'd put my own name in the icon I'm using on this comment. It's now so tiny as to almost entirely unnoticeable!

Perhaps it's just that I need to view dw at 150/200% to get that old school balance between text and icons.

Oh! I just double checked it and DW icons are now 60k! What luxury.

[cimorene]

Totally! I suppose we don't make uninformed choices when we pick which icon is our favorite or default originally, but at the same time, I didn't think of any of my icons at the time as really representing ME, not the way an avatar does (or a default icon when you only have one). They were all kind of mood-related reactions or fandom-specific or interest-specific ... sort of miniature header images? And then one of them just, er, got genericided!

I vacillate between wishing for an all-purpose avatar that would represent cartoon me in a way I like and wishing for a non-anthropomorphic one so I could change my hairstyle without feeling like I needed to update it. When I cut my hair from a bob to a pixie I was REALLY bothered that my default icon still has a bob.

[cimorene]

That's a good point! They used to take up quite a chunk of screen real estate. And considering how much smaller screens were... I remember making icons on a laptop in 2002 and the icon was something like a fifth of the browsing window height, once you subtracted the start bar and the title bars and the menu bars from 950 pixels or whatever it was.

[out_there]

My screen is so much larger now that it actually took me ages to notice that I'd put my own name in the icon I'm using on this comment. It's now so tiny as to almost entirely unnoticeable!

Huh. That's a good point. I had noticed that I'd shifted away from icons with text (unless they have big obvious text like my Aaaah! scrubs icon) but I hadn't realised the growing size of screens has led to icons seeming smaller and the text being harder to read.

[mizstorge]

I commissioned a new icon for use at tumblr, but changed back to my default LJ/DW icon so friends would recognize me...and now I'm back here, I have to remind myself that I have more than one icon option to use. And that maybe I should make some new ones.

[cimorene]

On my screen your icon there is even potentially a problem. Like, I can read it, but if I were sleepy I'd have to squint. People have probably tried bigger fonts and then given up when they looked too small to read comfortably (possibly unconsciously).

[cimorene]

I've heard a bunch of people thinking the same thing! Maybe we need an icon-making challenge fest or something, haha.