facechip
A portrait in, three vector avatars out.
Overview
Upload a portrait, get three hand-drawn vector avatars in seconds. Processed in memory, never stored.
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
- 01
Inverted every category default: seconds instead of minutes, free instead of paid, illustrated vector instead of photorealistic, nothing stored instead of an account.
- 02
Three finishes — line, solid, colour — from one upload. Three good options beats one "correct" answer and removes the need for a settings panel entirely.
- 03
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.
Features & interaction design
- 01
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.
- 02
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.
- 03
Privacy stated three times
Hero, features, footer. When you ask for someone's face, one reassurance isn't enough.
- 04
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.
Outcomes
- —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