Reduce community/user icons to 1 rem to make inline reading easier: design request

[jcklpe]

See intro on this ticket for explanation of what I'm trying to do here.

The request:
Community icons are 2rem. this makes them roughly twice as tall as the text they go with. This creates an unpleasant visual flow and makes stuff look wacky when wrapping. Would be better to do something like this:

Reasons to not do this?

1rem is kind of small for an icon. Generally speaking I think the community icons don't read well at small viewing sizes and since community icons are not under developer control (since it's user administrated content of the website) there's really no guarantee that it's visual clarity can be maintained. Not sure there's a good solution here. Making community and usernames 2rem tall would be kind of big for text.

[dessalines]

Getting the icon sizes right is tricky: too big and you get spacing issues, too small and you can't tell what they are.

I just checked both twitter and reddit, and they both use icons larger than the text size.

[jcklpe]

@dessalines Right but user avatars on twitter aren't inline, except on retweeted tweets.

I'd also say that there is a potential argument against having avatars visible in most instances to begin with. Reddit only recently got avatars and this was largely due to pressure I think from investors. Avatar presence can have an effect on people's expectations about a social media space. Communities that are largely anonymous or pseudonymous generally deemphasize things like avatars.

Not saying there is a right or wrong approach to that, but that might actually be something that a server admin would want to control on or off.

[dessalines]

You can already disable avatars in your user settings, and they're completely optional.