Avatar Upgrade

In 1999, as I was finishing my undergraduate degree from LUMS, I created my first web-based e-mail account. I'd been using Yahoo! since 1996 so, obviously, I got an account there. Being a Trekkie, I chose Commander Khan (i.e. cmdr_khan) as my username. I'd been using that online persona for years on IRC, in newsgroups, and in computer games (after retiring my old Quake name, Syntax Error).

An Avatar is Born

In 2003, when I made the Corduroy website, I installed on it a message board. For that message board, I needed an avatar. For my avatar, I neither had a good photograph of myself (that I could crop, resize, and use), nor did I really want to use one. Instead, I created a line-drawing based pictorial representation of myself using good old Paint Shop Pro. Inspired partly by The Matrix, this is what I came up with:

I felt this representation was crude, but simple and effective. It was clear, it stood out, and...well, it was by me, for me, and of me. That is to say, it was me.

From that time onwards, I used that image as an avatar on all the websites I became a member of (such as Facebook, Digg, and Orkut). I also upgraded all my membership profile pictures (my Yahoo! and Hotmail ones, for example) to it and even used it as profile picture in Skype (though for that I added to the image a speech bubble with the Skype logo in it).

And Ever the Twain Shall Meet

In early 2007, however, I felt that my trusty old avatar needed and upgrade. What kind of upgrade that would be, I wasn't sure. I still didn't want to use a photograph, though I did find a few that I could tweak and use. I did consider using my caricature (drawn by Sameer Noorani, one of my juniors in college):

but that didn't quite work either . The plain, stark, somewhat unusual, and crudely cartoonish format of my current avatar was still better than anything else that I could come up with.

Then, a few months later, it occured to me: Why not just upgrade my avatar instead of making an entirely new one? Closely following that was another, cooler thought: And why not really make it Commander Khan's avatar instead of just Ameel's avatar? And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I did. Though it did take me a few months to finally get around to doing it. Here, then, is my new Commander Khan avatar:

Like the graphical upgrade that I did for this website, my new avatar graphic is crisper and cleaner, with better colour and more detail (click the image for a larger version; note the TNG era uniform, Starfleet insignia communicator, and commander rank pips ). Unlike the last one, it is also correctly center-aligned. And, though my nose is still cartoon-ish, my ears are small (which, in reality, they are), and I don't have eyebrows, it works. At least I think so. What do you think?

Here they are side-by-side so you can compare and contrast them better:

Note: If you do want to comment on this upgradation, how about commenting on this related blog post of mine?

[Last updated: 21 September, 2007]