Alex Maestri and Awedacity, Hi and welcome to Crystal XP 
I think you are talking about Avatars like this one:
This beautiful avatar is designed by Draginal.You can also make your own.The thing you need is the basic knowledge of any good Graphic editing and creating software (like Adobe Photoshop).If you already know the basics then follow these tutorial like instructions ,(this tutorial is made for Photoshop 7+ verion but it will work in other softwares as well).
1. Open Photoshop and press Ctrl+N to creat a new document.You will see a window.Set the settings according to this image:
2. Then select Custom Shape Tools (U) and set these settings at Option bar situated above:
3. Now draw round edged rectangle and place it at the center.It will be automatically named as Shape1 ,rename it to Outline.Press Shift while drawing rectangle in order to make Width-Height ratio same or to make a perfect square.
4. Once you have correctly transformed it according to the size of your document , then rastersize it.To do so right-click on Outline layer in layer window and select Rastersize from the menu.you will see something like this:
5. Now right-click on Outline layer and go to Blending Options.Set these values in the respective blending options:
6. Then Ctrl+Click on Outline layer to load its selection.Go to Select>Modify>Contract and type 3 in the contract pixel bar and then press enter.Without deselcting , create a new layer (Ctrl+Shift+N) and name it Base.Fill it with any color (Use Alt+BackSpace to fill the layer with foreground color).
7. Right-Click on Base layer and select Blending Options and set these values:
Your document would be looking like this:
8. Click on Base layer and go to Select>Modify>Contract and type 9.Then Press enter.Without deselecting, create a new layer (Ctrl+Shift+N) and name it Image.Fill it with any color.
9. Go to its blending options and set these settings:
Your document would be looking similar to this:
[img]http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/3854/image5kz0.png/img]
10. Now you have the main frame.You just need to put an image (Tux G2 for example) at the center of this frame.Here is my final result:
You can also change the Gradient colors for Base and Image layers.
If this tut helped you or you liked it than do reply and show me your results.
, very helpful!
.
.
