JCF Style suggestion
 

Make signatures use the lowest font size by default.

Okay.

make your own theme \o/

make it interesting

Has this been actually considered and/or discussed?

Doesn't seem like it.

Gry is right as usual.

I think everyone just agreed, which killed the discussion, Cooba.

Cooba proposed changing the max vertical size to 150px. I can see that 200px, once utilised fully (esp with images that are also wide), is a lot.

Thoughts:

I think the problem is less tall images (e.g. Radium's current sig is 180px high, and while big doesn't actually take up that much space) and more tall sigs (e.g. Drmoo's current sig is approx. 270px high).

A suggestion would be to say what the max height of a sig should be. Enforcing such as a hard-and-fast rule obviously requires a lot of effort, but it could be used as a rough guide (something like "sigs should be no more than 300px or 10 lines tall").

Would it help like the default text size in sigs would be set to the lowest one (as once suggested)?

I don't really think that it is necessary to change the default text size.

If the text in people's signatures are taking up too much vertical space, then it should be their responsibility to reduce the text size, if that's what they want.

What I'm also suggesting here is that the vertical size limit not only apply to images, but to the entire signature.

Also keep in mind that text sizes look different to different people. Giving a max pixel height for text sigs would be very subjective.

I think it would be enough to encourage the use of tables, like Birdie and Monolith did in their sigs. I played with DrMoo's sig and squished it down to this:

You can do that without tables. Tables are for tabular information, not layout :roll:.

I think a maximum pixel size for signatures would be reasonable, and doesn't have to be subjective. Signature size could be measured with the web browser set at 'Normal' text size, which performs no additional scaling and should theoretically look the same across all modern standards-compliant browsers. Since lines of text don't always match up perfectly with pixel counts, the maximum could be approximate.

For whatever it's worth, the default text size in all major browsers is 16px, so it is indeed possible to have an objective pixel size limit.

Would a 200px limit for sigs be alright in that case, or too small?

One other thing to consider with total signature heights is the width of the browser window (or the table cell that the signature is in) because of word wrapping. So that just needs to be standardized too when measuring.

leave my sig alone. If there's a problem with it one of the admins/mods will tell me thank you.

Wait, there's a way to do parallel columns without messy table stuff? Do enlighten me.

Go mad with the float property.

In Internet Explorer that works fine, but in Firefox I'm just seeing a red box with "Mad Column 1" in it and "Mad Column 2" written directly beneath it. =/

Fixed?

Indeed it is fixed.

(Elaboration: Link's result works in Firefox. - Derby)