I originally designed LW with avatars, but couldn’t find a good compromise between avatars and high density of comment sections (they add a bunch of vertical height that means all comments need to either have more top margin or have a much deeper indent).
I am generally open to avatars and might want to give it another shot sometime.
I’d expected you to also be wary of them giving the site a distinctly casual feel, and/or less aesthetically harmonious feel (neither of which are necessarily wrong, but are definitely choices). Do those feel relevant to you?
I was thinking of customly generated avatars that are aesthetically consistent with the site (similar to how Google creates avatars based on your initials, or gives you cool animals if you are a guest)
Interesting, good to know. I’m curious if you considered doing something like lobste.rs, where the avatar is next to the username and the same height as the text.
I originally designed LW with avatars, but couldn’t find a good compromise between avatars and high density of comment sections (they add a bunch of vertical height that means all comments need to either have more top margin or have a much deeper indent).
I am generally open to avatars and might want to give it another shot sometime.
I’d expected you to also be wary of them giving the site a distinctly casual feel, and/or less aesthetically harmonious feel (neither of which are necessarily wrong, but are definitely choices). Do those feel relevant to you?
I was thinking of customly generated avatars that are aesthetically consistent with the site (similar to how Google creates avatars based on your initials, or gives you cool animals if you are a guest)
Interesting, good to know. I’m curious if you considered doing something like lobste.rs, where the avatar is next to the username and the same height as the text.
Yeah, that was the kind of thing I was thinking about. Lobste.rs’ was one inspiration I had for something that did it reasonably well.