Well in the excerpt you posted, transparency would look terrible because there wouldn't be a consistent outline due to clipping the hat, etc.; getting decent contrast against the background given that this site has at least three different stylesheets is another issue.

>>343659
I wasn't trying to single anyone out, that just happened to be on the front page.

>there wouldn't be a consistent outline due to clipping the hat, etc
That's not a bad thing. Giving a silhouette more complicated than a square makes things easier to identify. Obviously some things stand to benefit more than others from this, just due to how they make use of space, and the hat does put towards the end of that scale that receives less benefit. Even so, implying the square with the cutoff sides, but still allowing a recognizable contour, would help out a lot with the at-a-glance recognizability.
Indeed, the only one that wouldn't receive significant benefit from this is , because only a tiny corner would be transparent.

>getting decent contrast against the background given that this site has at least three different stylesheets is another issue.
There are four. The background colors are pink, dark salmon, blue, and a sort of a grey-blue colour. More importantly, they are all washed-out and quite light, except [Nice], which is still very far from colors normally used, just in a different way.
There is not a single image on /icons/ that would fail to have decent contrast on any of our stylesheets.

The orange and blue backgrounds in the example you posted serve to imbue each talking head's image with a feeling of consistency; I, for one, don't want their headwear to just be clipped off at the sides.

>at-a-glance recognizability.
Color. Then again, I don't much care for talking heads to begin with.

>>343673
Don't bad mouth Larro like that.