Linify Me accepts JPG uploads and redraws the images using only straight lines. The effect is ghostly yet technical, resembling something human-drawn but not enough to be confused as such. Watching the picture emerge over time is strangely meditative. Unless you've uploaded a picture of Trump, that is, in which case it's just another example of something slowly going wrong on a computer.

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Kent sez, "Enter your Twitter handle and watch as your tiny online avatar turns into large-scale generative art. Results can look like batik, pastel, or tie-dye, depending on the original."

We're calling the Twitter API from Yahoo! Query Language, receiving an image URL for your avatar, converting it to a data:uri, and returning its base64-encoded value as JSON with a callback.

Then we create an image on the client, load it with the data YQL gave us, and stretch it to fit our (comparatively very large) canvas tag.

Since we've created the image locally, the usual canvas security restrictions don't apply and we're free to sample pixels. We do this, collecting color values and positions, and then we start drawing circles with random sizes and tiny random offsets from where each color sample was taken.

Avatar Portraits .:. kentbrewster.com (Thanks, Kent!) Read the rest