Create an Avatar Component in Gatsby with TypeScript Part 1

In this series we’re going to take a look at creating a simple avatar component that is typed with TypeScript and has some special goodies in Gatsby land.

I usually write TypeScript from the start, but I wanted to show each piece individually in case others aren’t familiar with TypeScript yet.

Let’s start by identifying what our needs are for our avatar component.

• Should show an image
• Should be round
• Should accept an image url
• Should display an image based on a name (for small sets)

Cool, now we can start building our avatar. Start with an img element using a placeholder image as src. Add a little bit of styling to make it round and give it a size.

function Avatar(props) {
  const { url, altText, title } = props;

  const styles = {
    width: "75px",
    height: "75px",
    borderRadius: "50%",
  };

  return <img style={styles} src={url} alt={altText} title={title} />;
}

export default Avatar;

Then we can pass it the image url and alt text. We can see that the component is working in its basic implementation now.

<Avatar
  url="https://res.cloudinary.com/joelmturner/monster-01.png"
  alText="Monster P. Whittington portrait"
  title="Monster P. Whittington"
/>

• Should show an image
• Should be round
• Should accept an image url
• Should display an image based on a name (for small sets)

Looks good. We’ve met our first three criteria for this component. In step 2 we’ll make it more powerful with Gatsby Image.