The seed decides the face. Give the same user the same seed and their avatar survives every rebuild of your fixtures, which is the difference between a user list that looks stable and one that reshuffles on every refresh.
What you can control
- Six visual styles, from geometric identicons to illustrated robots.
- Crop control — square, rounded or circular — applied by the provider rather than by your CSS.
- A seed prefix namespaces a batch, so team avatars stay distinct from customer avatars.
- The seed is returned as a column, so you can store it and regenerate the identical image later.
What this is not
URLs point at DiceBear's hosted API. For production, self-host the library or download the SVGs — a user list that loads a hundred avatars from a third party is a hundred external requests.
Questions
Will the same seed always give the same avatar?
Yes. DiceBear is fully deterministic, so the seed is the only input that matters.
Can I self-host these?
Yes. DiceBear publishes as an npm package, so you can generate the same SVGs locally and serve them yourself.
Which style reads best at small sizes?
Identicons and rings. The illustrated styles carry detail that disappears below about 48 pixels.