Adding some (more) context from the discussion in this month’s community roundtable call, we learned that the current design of the badge assets has a lot of padding with the artwork itself. This was a requirement for the previous frontend implementation as adding padding in the frontend itself was (allegedly) either complicated or would have potentially messed up other things, when that was done. Thanks, @riecatnor for letting us know about this part of the previous implementation.
With the newer frontend, whichever it might be - Discourse or a standalone one, we should be well within our capacity to make the frontend design changes without having to transfer consequences from it over to the badges design. @gui1ty also suggested an automated way to help remove the unnecessary padding from the badge’s artwork assets as that would both, make the design very consistent with a designated formula or specification and help streamline the process of making this thing happen.