LinkedinLunatics

They perfectly illustrate the Corporate Mindset. I like to imagine they were designed by a conclave of neurotypical and painfully unfunny and uncreative MBAs who got together in a coworking space and brainstormed the most consensual and least offensive avatar tech they could fathom. Likely none of them ever had a passing thought about what makes for compelling character design. Certainly none of them can stomach the idea of emergent phenomenon in communication. And above all nothing must stick out; to them the idea that users would want to make a non-human, cyborg, furry, green-skinned, or whatever avatar is abhorrent. Jane's quirky facial expression is the full extent of allowable creativity (and even then you know they had a 30 minute debate about including it).

These avatars do a better job of inspiring dread in me than half the shit in Severance.

Tangentially, it reminds me of when we went from Geocities/MySpace/custom reddit CSS/custom youtube pages to "you can change your PP and banner". ..... okay? Was a unified design language really worth crushing all visual creativity?
... and now I think it's a shame that Lemmy and Mastodon's default clients don't support (AFAIK) custom CSS for communities/user pages. I think that would be very iconic for the Free Web. Is someone working on this? I feel like someone should be working on this.