Look at this picture:
The badge number is on the right of the icon and nearer to the right icon, it seems that the number is for the right badge instead of the left. Maybe moving the position of the numbers more left or even to the upper or lower of the icon would be a better idea?
At first, I thought maybe it was reserving a little bit of extra space for an extra digit – but that doesn't appear to be the case:
I think they've been tweaking the appearance of some sites – I'm not sure if a recent change is responsible for the bad spacing that you noticed.
We may have to elevate this question to SE to get it resolved.
This seems to be something unique to the old designs.
On Meta, the numbers are tighter:
and also on the new theme for EL&U:
but Workplace has the same issues:
Thanks for the bug report!
The placement of badges has perennially been an issue for us. It's actually one of the bugs we've talked about that gets reintroduced often when we make changes to the sites. It's one of the reasons we've switched to the unified themes and why we weren't going to retain custom badges initially.
The root cause is that the badges are slightly different shapes/sizes on all of the sites, so how they're positioned is special for each site - some are wider, others are taller - so positioning each perfectly on every site simultaneously with one setting is difficult. To avoid this being a problem in the future, we'll need to make some adjustments but we are working on it.
To quote one of the designers elsewhere:
Network-wide we'll be revisiting the sizes of these glyphs after the new themes launch everywhere. Some themes have bigger badges than others and it's causing display issues between themes, this one included. Thanks for reporting! It'll get fixed when we refactor how badges are displayed.
This is on the horizon to be looked at, though not sure how soon... and, hopefully, once completed, this won't be a problem moving forward.
