Tweaking details
Here is another good reason to use high-res icons. Buddy-login notifications from the pidgin libnotify-plugin. In addition to that, relying on notify-osd’s “truncation” capability (query for it, don’t just assume it’s there) brings further polish for free. It takes the burden of truncating notification text (summary and body) from an application.
A before/after screencast for buddy-login notifications from pidgin demonstrates the visual benefits clearly:
The notification development guideline will have an updated section dealing with the “truncation” capability soon.