Yes.

how about no animated gifs as a restriction???

60x60, cubits or pixels, can’t remember.

I raised this issue previously and got no response. Maybe the programmers do read stuff on the bug list, but there aren’t as many responses as there are bug reports, and so the same bugs get reported over and over.

Apparently the size limit is 60 x 60. I don’t know if it was that size before or not; in any case an avatar still worked if it was slightly over. One of the benefits of the redesign is forced compliance (truncation).

60x60 has always been the size. But it wasn’t forced.

Hey Steve, what happened to the flute player?
I quite like the new avatar, too, but didn’t recognise you at first.

The flute player was Kokopelli.

Kokopelli is a figure commonly found in petroglyphs and pottery throughout the southwest. He Is regarded as the universal symbol of fertility for all life, be it crops, hopes, dreams, or love. The first known images of him appear on Hohokam pottery dated to sometime between AD 750 and AD 850. He is also a trickster god and represents the spirit of music.

Sorry to let it go, but Kokopelli suffered severely by the new avatar size enforcement, and I tried reducing it to the required 60 x 60 but my results were too fuzzy and jaggy and weren’t very clear. If I knew how to keep the resolution at a reduced size, I’d go back to using it again.

My new avatar is the logo I use on my newsletter &cetera and symbolizes my belief that heart-smart and head-smart both count, but heart-smart counts more. Thanks for noticing, Mili.

hmmm...i’m not sure but mine seems ok lol

> universal symbol of fertility

I thought that was the spiral.
Kokopelli seems way too complex and literal to be a universal symbol
for anything. Except a guy playing the flute. Or smoking something.

hhp

Miss G, you’re still only 60px tall. Mine, on the other hand (and grrrrrrrr to forced restrictions...), is screwed. We are typographers, right? Working quite often with book spreads, right? Squares. What the hell with the squares! Ah, but there is a spread in the square, of course, just a really small one...

Have no fear of the square, it is just a square.

I think most book designers would be more concerned about pages that were all random sizes ;)

However, heads are generally taller than they are wide, so square proportions are unnatural for portraits.
What would be so terrible about providing a frame that harmonizes with reality? — rather than the present situation, which just makes things awkward and difficult.

http://typophile.com/user/14779
Now THAT’S an avatar...

> heads are generally taller than they are wide,
> so square proportions are unnatural for portraits.

Don’t use the whole width.
Or don’t use your head.

hhp

http://typophile.com/user/17719

This is an excellent example of how one can work inside the 60px.

Was there REALLY a problem with avators before when they slightly exceeded the 60 x 60 limit? If not, why were the pixel police called in?

We have always recommended 60px, however I think the new restriction is part of the Drupal (Typophile’s platform) upgrade. It wasn’t manually enforced.

@hrant: Now THAT’S an avatar...

Naah, you just get all tingly every time you see a sesquiocular ’g’. Why is that? Was there some moment of ecstatic joy in your childhood in which a Baskerville ’g’ played a significant role?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Beautiful new avatars, everybody, btw. It’s time to redo mine. I did it as an understated visual pun around the time the first drupal redesign happened, but I think it has served its term. All these little patches of color are so happy, like a flower garden. I’ll see if I find some inspiration soon.

No, I’m pretty sure it’s the horns and tail that make me tingly. But if it’s the 1.5 eyes, it still can’t be due to Baskerville, I don’t think. Was there a lot of Baskerville in late-70s Palo Alto? Because I’m pretty sure there wasn’t in early-70s or 80s Beirut... Plus I don’t even really like Baskerville’s: it’s too apologetic, too English.

BTW, I think my avatar is surviving the reduction in the page footers quite well (I do have a thing for optical scaling after all :-) although I’m not happy about the glaring aliasing in my eyebrow.

hhp

More: I think my love for the open-bottom binocular “g” (still easier to type out than “sesquiocular” :-) comes from a desire to shoot down convention; and replacing a stale convention with something better is a nice bonus. :-) It’s a supreme case of a subtle but significant improvement to what so many people blindly assume is the ideal form. When you think about it, the conventional binocular “g” is too complex to fit with the rest of the alphabet; it’s almost like a Chinese logograph. We -and readers- might not notice a problem most of the time, but especially when it’s doubled, it can jump out. The open-bottom one is a much more harmonious and functional solution. Danm shame most designers who use it do it merely for fashion though.

hhp

ah well i guess 60 x 60 is better that 50 x 50..which is the size deviantart allows..

shreyas

We have always recommended 60px

The moral of this story is... follow the guidelines. :-)

Hmmm. Do we tell type designers to “follow the guidelines”?

Here, I made you a new one, fitting a 60px width. Enjoy!

Technical avatar question: I want to get rid of the white box around my round logo. I sampled the background color of the page and voila it works - within a thread. But then when it appears in the avatar parade at the bottom - which is on a darker tint, the pale grey looks like a white box again. How did those of you (Aleksander, Biddy among others) manage to silo your icons?

Patty

You need to make the background area transparent, and save as a gif or png (jpg won’t honor transparency).

Tried it, and it didn’t work. Came out all weird looking and the color off. Oh well. I don’t know much about gifs or transparency or web stuff.

Photoshop to ImageReady you can work with the size/number of colors of a gif. Try giving it a higher number of colors until the color doesn’t shift. I believe that in the same window you can sample the gif and let it know which color pixel you need to be transparent.

Looks right on screen to me as it is now.

Patty, you could also select the white pixels in your Photoshop image and delete them to get the desired transparency in the GIF. You’ll know they’re gone when you can see the checkerboard pattern beneath.

Sorry, having to work on my site. Didn’t want to leave a dead link. Sharon

Thanks Jesse, I’ve plunked it into place...