All types of Avatars

Here are some resources for making avatars, ranging from quick & simple to super-customizable & involved. Make a manga avatar at www.faceyourmanga.com Just take a look to the left to see all the different kinds of faces you can make.

“Mypictr is a simple web app that helps you create avatars - or "social pictures", as it calls them -- by uploading a picture and either selecting the social network you want to use it with or defining your own dimensions. For example, let's say you've been dying to upload your favorite avatar, but you just don't know (or don't have the time to figure out) how to get your image resized to 160x160 pixels. Just upload your picture, enter your desired dimensions, and drag around the zoom and crop tools until your avatar is perfect. Hit "pictrit" and you have the option to download the cropped image or have it emailed to you. Now you've go no excuse for that unattractive "no image available" default.” — Adam Pash

At www.ImageChef.com, (example on the right) you can make stylish custom images and animations. Turn your slogan into a neon sign. Drop your own photos into picture frames. Add your own text and share via e-mail, Face Book, MySpace and more.

Ever wonder how you might look as a South Park character? Find out with Create-a-Character. This browser-based Flash 'game' lets you assemble characters in a matter of minutes. Pick yourself a head, a hat (or hair), eyes, a mouth, and all the other trademark South Park parts, then adorn yourself with amusing extras. There's no save feature, but a simple print-screen will copy the image to your clipboard. From there you can paste it into your favorite image editor and save it for posterity. Great way to make an avatar, too. For anyone who's a fan of the show, there's no better way to kill five minutes. Respect my authoritah!" — Rick Broida “ Bored with your typical IM icons and emoticons? Us too. That's why we're thrilled to see Mojizu and the Mojicon Dispenser. It's a free download, for Windows only, that will let you browse a whole bunch of Mojis; neat, unique character avatars, emoticons and more. The icons are based on characters created by artists around the world for the Mojizu community. Not only will you find some neat icons, you'll be helping artists get their work seen. Give it a look, there's lots of fun stuff there. ”

http://avatars.yahoo.com This is Yahoo’s very customizable, and easy avatar maker. It is useable in Yahoo’s instant messenger and all around yahoo’s massive offerings. It’s animated and really easy to update, because you can mark certain items and extras as favorites. http://www.doppelme.com Cuter, simpler, and for another purpose. You can use this pretty much anywhere, unlike Yahoo’s avatars. For web pages, social network site, blogs, and even e-mail signatures.

http://www.photofunia.com
Put some Photoshop wizardry at your fingertips with photo manipulation site PhotoFunia. Take a clean head shot of yourself or the soon-to-be-victim of your prank and upload it to PhotoFunia. There are currently sixty nine photos that faces can be pasted into ranging from the Andy Warhol-esque art gallery scene featured in the image above to magazine covers, currency, famous photos, and more. The process is fast and requires no interaction from the user other than selecting the template to be used and uploading the picture. With a simple head shot most of the templates worked just fine, with a few having odd sizing issues (i.e. my noggin looked way too big for the scale of the picture.) Once PhotoFunia generates the picture it can be saved at full size, saved in a smaller forum-friendly avatar size, or saved to ImageShack.

http://www.imvu.com For 3D chat, animated 3D scenes, dress up your 3D avatar with new clothes, shoes, hairstyles, accessories, pets, furniture and more.

The New York Zoo and Aquarium want to help you let your wild side out, with their web site, http://www.buildyourwildself.com

At www.meez.com you can create your very own 3D version of yourself that you can export. Here's my version.