It is very very easy to go back to square. Literally one line of CSS.
But like the kids say, once you go round, you donāt go back.
And that line would beā¦ ?
Oh, uh, Iām just asking for a friend.
I spent about 10 minutes looking to see whoās avatars were least changed before winding up in this threadā¦
Iām not sure whether or not the bikeshed analogy holds here. Itās not a change in something like āsleep(1) should do fractional secondsā, but avatars, as a graphical representation of self. I threw mine up in a hurry and didnāt care so much, but I imagine some people spent considerable time on theirs. It will be interesting to see if there is much backlash on the change or not.
Iām not a UI guy, and definitely prefer to work on back end code, so take it with a grain of salt.
You could make it a per-user option, how we intend our own avatars to look. Instead of making readers tweak CSS.
had to follow suit, I allowed for a pixel or two cause I couldnāt see the substructure any more. 
I believe safe square area is a 94 pixel square centred within a 128 square if anybody was wondering.
ugh, now I need to do the transparency, which seems not to save in MS paintā¦ even as a png. Whereās that copy of photoshoop?
Nice. The slightly rounded corners work well.
Thanks to the Mighty Brane of @daneelā¦
I agree that it provides breathing room but the eye tends to flow over the rounded avatars and āsticksā for a micro-moment longer on the square avatars.
I believe this allows me to more easily take in the picture and more quickly recognise the avatar.
This is in really small time parcels though, Iām only noticing the difference because I know photoshop and can see the pixels.
Srsly though, try an experiment by glancing through the avatars in the picture of the post you linked. The eye certainly flows over the page that tiny but more easily, but is that really better when you are trying to load the chunk into active neural whitespace and let comparative association through memory do itās magic?
gawrsh, and hereās me been using a substandard upscale all this time. 
dang
tiem for bunny
Whatās the worst circular emoji anyone can find?
shhhhhh.
The only issue is that in the threaded conversation, I can see the spoilers. Can you make that work there too?
