Freesound Forums

In the old UI, avatars showed the full square image. In the new UI, avatars are rounded, which leads to only ~78% of the full image being shown, severely limiting creative potential with avatars. Even if someone somehow manages to hack the CSS to make avatars show the full image—the avatar they chose, if made to fully take advantage of the image space, will not show up correctly for other users. At least give people the (immediately visible on edit profile page) choice between if their avatar is shown as square or circular on the website. I've seen tons of fun designs that aren't possible with forced circular avatars.

I can't help but feel this makes sense. I suppose the questions this question leads to would be:
a) would they be willing to change it back
b) how much work would it take to do so

I should say there are things I really like about the new UI - especially the info on one's profile that lets one see how many times all of your sounds in total have been downloaded.

Hi,

To be honest, I don't remember now if there was any reason (other than aesthetics) for making user avatars round, but to my eyes it looks quite nice in Freesound. Also it is common practice in many other websites so I'd say it is not a bad idea. You can very easily hack the css to make avatars square (or square-ish). You just need to change the "border-radius" of the css class "avatar", so maybe you want to give it a try with some browser extension?

Thanks!

You can very easily hack the css to make avatars square (or square-ish). You just need to change the "border-radius" of the css class "avatar", so maybe you want to give it a try with some browser extension?

That worked well, and it revealed to me how apparently efficient and flexible your new ui is HTML/CSS wise, though this still leaves the essential problem with simply using an extension to modify the look of the website;
If someone hacks the CSS to make avatars appear as square, and afterwards makes or selects an avatar for themselves that takes full advantage of the square image space, anyone else who isn't hacking the CSS still sees it as cropped to a circle instead of as intended. Circular avatars heavily restrict creativity and customizability.
The point of an avatar is that the image you choose represents you, and I feel that it should remain uncompromised in terms of how much of the image is visible by default.
It's useful to think of avatars as being more like paintings or album covers but for users (especially fitting analogy for this particular site) to understand what I mean. If every single album cover had to be circular, their composition and ability to be creative & unique & interesting would be severely restricted, it's the same way for avatars. Scrolling through recently created sounds, going on random profiles with avatars, and turning the CSS override extension (used to remove rounding on avatars locally) on and off, I can see many avatars that either only look right when or are greatly improved when the avatar image is not rounded.
I understand that the circle is a pleasing shape, but having square avatars allows for far more varied image compositions and user creativity and expression.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Old UI had square avatars, so most would have been "designed" with square avatars in mind. Although I understand your point, I don't think we're going to change this because it changes the design in a rather significant way. Unless there is an incredible popular demand and then we could reconsider at least But really, thanks for taking your time and making a proper suggestion.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Old UI had square avatars, so most would have been "designed" with square avatars in mind. Although I understand your point, I don't think we're going to change this because it changes the design in a rather significant way. Unless there is an incredible popular demand and then we could reconsider at least But really, thanks for taking your time and making a proper suggestion.

I suppose that's fair enough, thank you for your consideration