A portrait in, three vector avatars out.
Upload a portrait, get three hand-drawn vector avatars in seconds. Processed in memory, never stored.
facechip
Design · Vercel · Live
At a glance
Problem
AI headshot tools are slow, paid, and produce uncanny results. People just want a decent profile picture.
Role
Product, image pipeline, interaction design, front end, privacy architecture.
Stack
Next.js App Router, in-memory image processing, three-finish vector generation, client-side downloads, opt-in gallery.
Status
Live and free.
The problem.
The category default is "upload your face, wait twenty minutes, pay, receive something melty." Each of those four things is a design choice, and all four are wrong for the actual job — which is "I need a profile picture in the next two minutes and I'd rather not look like a hallucination."
0→1.
Inverted every category default: seconds instead of minutes, free instead of paid, illustrated vector instead of photorealistic, nothing stored instead of an account.
Three finishes — line, solid, colour — from one upload. Three good options beats one "correct" answer and removes the need for a settings panel entirely.
Built the pipeline stateless by construction, so the privacy claim is architectural rather than a policy.
Under the hood.
The processing pipeline is stateless by construction — there's no persistence layer to leak, which is a stronger guarantee than a retention policy. Vector output means downloads are small and scale cleanly to any avatar size.
Interaction.
Show the output before the input
The hero displays all three finishes from a sample portrait. The value proposition is a picture, so the hero is pictures.
Three finishes, no controls
Every parameter I exposed would have been a decision to make and a support burden. One upload, three results, pick one.
Privacy stated three times
Hero, features, footer. When you ask for someone's face, one reassurance isn't enough.
Opt-in gallery, downloads on device
Published avatars appear publicly; nothing else does. Social proof without a consent problem — and no server round-trip for the file the user actually wants.
What shipped.
- A free avatar generator with three finishes, no signup, no storage, and an opt-in public gallery. Live.
- Differentiated from 'melty AI headshot' generators with craft positioning
- Strong trust story for privacy-conscious users
- Image pipeline
- Privacy design
- Product