Tag: favicon

Way back in 2009 I said that every site should have a favicon. It was not the first time I’d expressed such an opinion, and I still remember back when IE 5 rolled out and I saw them on my bookmarks for the first time. Actually, I remember when a coworker asked me to help her make them show again, and I had no idea what she was talking about. As soon as I saw them, I knew this tiny feature would be useful.

Back in those days, of course, we didn’t have ‘tabbed’ browsers. So you knew what site you were on because that was your window. Now, with somewhere between 10 and 20 active tabs on a browser (depending on if you’re me or someone like Andrea or Nacin – I like the fewer) the favicon is a fantastic way to go “Aha! That’s where the tab for Google went…”

Speaking of Google, the other day I was browsing on my iPad and realized that not only does Google show you different favicons depending on which page you’re on, but they also show you them in retina format.

Hold the phone.

Retina. Ready. Favicons.

Well. Clearly I needed to upgrade mine! Of course there are problems with this. The old favicon standard was a 16×16 pixel square that you had to make memorable and identifiable. This is not simple. I picked a hat for ipstenu.org and on a retina display, this still looks okay, even though it’s pixelated. It gives off an 8-bit vibe to things, and that’s pretty me, in that retro-cool way, so I don’t mind. It’s not fuzzy, after all. The same cannot be said of my Spock-eye here, however. I didn’t want to lose the geekiness of the eyebrow, so I sat and pondered my options.

Since my original favicon (see right) was 16×16 and an ICO, I had no choice but to deal with being fuzzy, upgrade or make a whole new favicon. I wanted to keep Spock, so I grabbed a screen-shot of Spock from what is everyone’s favorite Spock episode, “Amok Time.”

I spent a lot of time cropping and tweaking, and finally I remembered that one of the things I am terrible at is images. Sorry, Spock. I still love you. But I resigned myself to my lack of ability in this, and figured that since I had recently redesigned Half-Elf, I may as well get a new icon. Something that wasn’t just geeky, but also more modern. Normally when I do this, I end up over at IconFactory, who were my go-to standards for desktop icons on my Mac. They used to have a pretty amazing Freeware section, but it hasn’t been updated since 2012, and that tells me they’re done with it.

The real problem with icons is, of course, simplicity. The more complex you make one, the harder is it for anyone to know what it is. And it’s just plain hard to do this when you want higher resolutions. Conundrums. After messing around for more time, I remembered I had some old Nintendo retro icons saved from the last time I was doing this, and boiled it down to three:

I’m not a huge Mario fan, so I kicked him out, and tried the Mushroom. Cute. Iconic. Identifiable to some. And it had a reminder to me of a childhood book. It was also ‘bright’ and stood out on my toolbar. So I did that.

Now you can’t always get away with this. Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and make a new favicon, or convert the perfect PNG to a favicon. Remember, IE doesn’t accept PNGs for favicons. For that I actually use X-Icon Editor, which lets me tweak each size on it’s own. That means you have make a super complicated 64×64, for retinas, and a simple 16×16 for everyone else. But remember: KISS.

Keep all this simple.

Oh. And the mushroom is an extra joke. See, if you hit it in Super Mario Bros., it took you from Small Mario to Normal Mario. Now it takes me from small favicon to large favicon. And yes, it was on purpose.