With the forum upgrade this past June came a new feature that virtually none of us has used (or known about) so far: rectangular avatars!
Historically, avatars were limited to be square, 36x36. Now, the limits are 64x36 for board avatars, and 128x72 for profile avatars. Keep in mind: your avatar will be subjected to the server's downscaling algorithm which is probably not as crisp as what you could achieve with a desktop image manipulation program (Paint.NET, GIMP, MSPaint, Photoshop, Corel Draw...).
While you're having fun creating a new high-res profile picture:
- It's unnecessary to upload a profile picture larger than 128x72 for two reasons: it will not look as crisp as if you resized it yourself, and the unnecessarily large filesize slows down the forums for everyone!
- You can still keep a classic square avatar, but consider upsizing it to 72x72 so it shows up higher-res on your profile page
- If you are concerned with pixelation/artifacts in the server's downscaling routine, PNG's may look significantly better than JPG depending on your image!
- Also, depending on the image, the filesize can differ dramatically (JPGs are smaller for many-color photos, PNGs are smaller for few-color images such as LabVIEW screenshots).
- Make your goal to stay well below the 20kB 'knee'!
LabVIEW user groep 
