The Anatomy Of An Avatar [Infographic]

I have long been thinking about switching out my avatar on Twitter since I have grown quite tired of it. There is some research out there that says switching your avatar can be quite disastrous since your followers could have grown accustomed to finding you just by looking at your avatar instead of your Twitter handle. Since I can’t decide whether to switch it out or not at this moment, I am just going to leave it for now and maybe revisit the idea in the future. I am not sure if there is any extensive research done about what the perfect avatar should look like, but as far as I know, nothing has really been published anywhere about it. Sure, there are a landslide of tutorials and guides out there, but where are the articles that are based on real data?

I managed to find a small infographic that ventured into this area, if just by a couple of inches, and it takes a closer look at 64 people’s avatars and how they are displayed. 64 people can’t be viewed as a large enough body of numbers to tell the story of most avatars on Twitter so this is purely an aesthetic presentation of incomplete data that is now shared as an infographic called The Anatomy Of An Avatar. It’s presented by Build, but as I understand it, it’s designed by the talented designer Jonny Campbell (@jonnycampbell).

Unfortunately, there is no data to tell us whether certain avatars that have been included in this project are better than some of the others. It just states different characteristics and “accessories” of the avatars. I enjoy the the data collected, but I can’t keep myself from feeling that this study could have been way more in depth. The infographic itself is easy to understand and pretty straight forward, and I guess we can at least derive what category our own avatar falls into. After all, the infographic isn’t called The Anatomy Of A Perfect Avatar, so maybe my expectations were a little too high for this one. I need to do some research to see if there really is no accurate information out there that outlines the perfect avatar. What would you think it would look like? Any ideas?