Hop around on the Web (especially Twitter) and you’ll see a common design trend: Cropped head shots–cropped for bios, avatars, for a lot.
If eyes are the window into the soul, a photo of a cropped human face is the window into Web 2.0 personal, digital branding.
Consider:
There’s the famous top half of a head (Seth Godin, master of blogging and ideas that spread). There are lots of single eyes (Ev, co-founder of Twitter, comes instantly to mind). And there are pairs of eyes (too numerous to count).
Pretty nifty and memorable, but cutting-edge original?
At first glance, it sure feels that way. If you weren’t around during WW II or the Korean War (I wasn’t either)–or are not a student of graffito and street art (I’m not)–you’d think, hey, the cropping-avatar-biography-image-thing is clever and cool.
Yes, it is.
But it’s already been done.
“Kilroy” is a bona-fide original. He made his doodling debut in the 1940s. The phrase “Kilroy was here” accompanied a line drawing of Kilroy, two eyes, two hands and a nose peering over a make-believe wall. The image was the U.S. soldiers’ way of marking turf in Europe and other tours of duty.
Digital cameras? No way. Not then. Hand-drawn. An idea that could onlly spread as fast as G.I.’s could draw and write.
Today, thanks to social media, the “Kilroy” style may be one of the most viral design elements out there, a visual idea worth spreading. Kilroy is the foundation for a popular way to brand your face (and yourself) on Twitter, your blog or Facebook.
Nearly seven decades after he debuted, Kilroy remains here among us, but his name has been changed to Personal Digital Branding.
