In a UX-focused design experiment titled “Chat avatar size increase in sidebar [brought to core],” chapoi increased chat avatars in the sidebar from 22px to 28px to improve visibility, especially for less familiar users. The row height was kept unchanged to preserve information density, though this may make rows feel slightly less spacious. Channel icons were left at their original size, as they lack fine detail and don’t benefit as much from scaling. sam noted the visual imbalance this creates compared to Slack’s more uniform sizing. jordan.vidrine supported the avatar increase but suggested channel icons should scale proportionally to maintain visual harmony, cautioning that uniform “chubby” icons could feel repetitive. They also proposed allowing emoji avatars for chat channels — a long-standing design wish — and suggested adopting lighter icons like Slack’s hashtag instead of the current filled chat bubble. chapoi agreed emoji avatars would be ideal but noted the default icon must still function well; they offered to scale channel icons proportionally. jordan.vidrine endorsed testing that proportional scaling. Moin expressed missing the larger avatars, to which chapoi confirmed they’re returning — now officially merged into core as of July 3, 2025 via GitHub PR #33468.
The chat avatars displayed in the sidebar (under the DMS) section have been increased from a modest 22px to a more robust 28px (on normal font-size setting).
Reasoning
The small images make it difficult to see any details, especially for less familiar avatars.
Screenshots
The example is unfortunately without detailed avatars on my dev environment, but you get the gist.
To keep the information density the same, I’ve chosen to not increase the general row height. A potential consequence could be that the rows come across as slightly less spacious.
We are also aware that the section title no longer aligns with the usernames, but we’re willing to accept that trade-off at the moment.
The channel icons have been kept at the same size as before, since they do not have any details that suffer from a small size and are therefor less in need of an increase in size.
This brings me to another issue that I think possibly could make things better, but is beyond a design experiment (i think).
Could we allow emoji choice as avatars for chat channels? Rather than this default chat icon? Or an icon that is more lightweight? Slack and Discord both have the hashtag as their chat icon which is much more lightweight than our filled in chat bubble icon.
Yeah that’s been on my design backlog request for a long time! Would love it too. That being said, if the default would remain the channel icon (which it would), it still needs to work for that scenario too.
I can increase the size of the channel icons, but not to the same extend. They already were smaller than avatars, so we can keep the same ratio.
