Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

• By Sven Lennartz
• June 14th, 2007
• Favicons, Icons, Logo design
• 39 Comments

We love creative favicons. Their beauty lies in the approach a designer has chosen to put something really unique inside of the 16x16px box. Designing favicons, it’s necessary to work with miniature images, and every extra pixel can be the wrong one. A good favicon is original, beautiful and – in best case – fits to the logotype and color schemes used in the web-site. Creating them is a challenge not every designer is able to cope with. It’s hard, but not impossible. In fact, many creative solutions are possible, but it’s damn hard to come up with some of them once you need them.

Sometimes it’s enough to rescale the logo to an appropriate size, as shown by Xpanity Favicon:

If rescaling doesn’t provide optimal results, you can try to extract some parts of your logo and bundle them together, like Kijiji did.

We’ve collected some of them – 40 gorgeous, creative and visually appealing favicons you can use as a source of inspiration, e.g. if you have a creativity block. Images are linked; to visit the page with the favicon you like, just click on it.

You can find further favicon-showcases in the posts we’ve published before:

• Inspire Yourself: 50 Remarkable Favicons
• Inspire Yourself: More Creative Favicons

40 Creative Favicons

(updated)