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Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

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We love creative favicons. Their beauty lies in the approach a designer has chosen to put something really unique inside of the 16×16px 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:

Xpanity in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

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

Kijiji in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

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:

[Offtopic: by the way, do you know the Smashing Network has its own Smashing Network RSS Feed? Only excerpts are displayed in the feed.]

40 Creative Favicons

Blogmad in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Sitereference in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Exta in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Laptop in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Skyrocket in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Weblinc in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Egobits in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Rouxbe in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Mojohd in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Designgive in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Freeagentcentral in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Yoono in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Jellyfish in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Wefi in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Simplifyhosting in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Foolscap in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful (updated)

Creativebits in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Favbunt-3 in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Favbunt-5 in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Favbunt-11 in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Orgoo in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Turbomilk in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Sheero in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Cingular in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Mingle2 in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Wakoopa in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Swivel in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Airset in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Eqo in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Chipin in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Crucialwebhost in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Buzzshout in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Carepilot in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Boagworld in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Avvenu in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Speedbit in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Iconkits in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Jonno in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

Designfocus in Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

The Co-Founder of Smashing Magazine. Former writer, web designer, freelancer and webworker. Author of several books. Runs the business.

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  1. 1
    Le Tung Lam
    June 14th, 2007 10:28 pm

    Great Icon….

    I think favicon of simplebits is also a beautiful icon.

  2. 2
    Shankar Ganesh
    June 14th, 2007 10:51 pm

    I wonder how you guys get around the web to collect these icons. You have collected many inspirational ones. Thank You.

  3. 3
    Tony D. Clark
    June 14th, 2007 11:23 pm

    Great collection. I love the constraints of designing a favicon.

    When the logo doesn’t work, having to capture the essence of the site in 16×16 pixels is a challenge that sparks creativity.

  4. 4
    Goran Mitic
    June 14th, 2007 11:25 pm

    I like this this collection. Icon makers are really specific type of artists. Create good work on these small piece of screen is not only art but heroic craft.

  5. 5
    Arpit Jacob
    June 14th, 2007 11:56 pm

    Great Post but I think that you have been posted them before.

  6. 6
    Ingo
    June 15th, 2007 12:33 am

    the icon listed for foolscap.de (16th from top) is not their’s. It’s the logo of TYPO3, the content management system!

  7. 7
    Ingo
    June 15th, 2007 12:34 am

    forgot the link: typo3.org

  8. 8
    Tammy Wilson
    June 15th, 2007 3:23 am

    I’m having problems getting my favicon to show up in IE7. It’s fine in FireFox and Opera. Is there anything special I have to do to get it to work in IE?

  9. 9
    criticalerror
    June 15th, 2007 4:16 am

    I’ve to change my favicon!!!!

    I think that this is the second article about this, so 2 good articles about smoething that’s forgeted most of the times!!!!

  10. 10
    Matty
    June 15th, 2007 8:21 am

    I thought it was 18px by 18px. I thought wrong =)

  11. 11
    meizopan
    June 15th, 2007 11:11 am

    when tiny be crative. awesome

  12. 12
    Hitesh Mehta
    June 15th, 2007 10:39 pm

    beautiful collection…. !

  13. 13
    OverZero.it
    June 15th, 2007 11:40 pm

    Yeah, very inspiring!

  14. 14
    Narga
    June 16th, 2007 12:50 am

    That is good icons, very inspiring!

  15. 15
    GreySheepDuo
    June 16th, 2007 1:47 am

    Why isn’t the Flickr favicon in there? It only has the colors of the logo — far more creative than a logo that’s simply been scaled down.

  16. 16
    milo
    June 16th, 2007 3:59 am

    You guys love linkbait, do you?

  17. 17
    Jeffrey
    June 16th, 2007 8:12 am

    i think Meebo’s favicon should be on the list. Its pretty sweet.

  18. 18
    Mandy
    June 16th, 2007 9:07 am

    Davezilla.com has a really cool one! A tiny dragon with teeth!!

  19. 19
    Arthur
    June 16th, 2007 5:03 pm

    Well I must admit that most of these are pretty impressive while most of them use light tone colors it is easier to make them viewable at there small size. People with Darker color logos beware. Good compilation though!

  20. 20
    Rohit
    June 16th, 2007 6:13 pm

    Nice icons..How do they design it???
    CAn anyone get one for my blog?

  21. 21
    Alan Clifford
    June 17th, 2007 2:06 am

    egobits.gif is 34 x 34 pixels.


    Alan Clifford

  22. 22
    Alan Clifford
    June 17th, 2007 2:09 am

    http://www.smashingmagazine.com/favicon.ico is 32 x 32 pixels not 16 x 16

  23. 23
    Alastair
    June 17th, 2007 5:57 am

    Because of the horizontal nature of our logo (link, jpg, 12k) we had to take just one part and concentrate on that for our favico – link, 32×32px gif, &lt1k).

    I found it quite constraining initially, but now that I’ve come to terms with it I’ve found that I’m using a larger scale version for other purposes (swap 32×32 for 64×64 in the previous url to see).

    – Alastair.

  24. 24
    Motorcycle Guy
    June 18th, 2007 9:48 am

    Wow some of these are really amazing. I think if you can design a good favicon you can design anything!

  25. 25
    Andres Santos
    June 18th, 2007 9:53 am

    # Alan Clifford
    actually egobits.ico is 16×16 … what are the pros of using a 32×32 icon?

  26. 26
    krull
    June 18th, 2007 5:29 pm

    typo3.org FTW! :D

  27. 27
    manish
    June 19th, 2007 3:27 pm

    i had worked on designing of 24×24 and 32×32 and it seems toughest tasks coz of too much constraints but , doing that much creative work on 16×16 is awesome

    To present ur idea on 16×16 and showing it clearly is outstanding. Sooo size does matter when its tooooo smallllll :-)

  28. 28
    Martin S
    June 19th, 2007 8:50 pm

    The favicons on bonnierskonsthall.se will be changed everyday (Safari is caching them though but Firefox will show a new one everyday) to reflect day year-long color scheme the site follows.

  29. 29
    iddaa
    June 21st, 2007 11:24 pm

    Realy great icons.
    i will use as soon as possible.

  30. 30
    Mostafa Darvishzadeh
    June 22nd, 2007 3:50 am

    not bad
    i’m making an icon for my website ;)

  31. 31
    Sebastian
    July 2nd, 2007 4:03 pm

    Awsome collection, well done ;-)

  32. 32
    Matty
    July 31st, 2007 3:38 pm

    Did you know you can make your Favicon an animated GIF. I’m sure you can take the creativity a step further ;)

  33. 33
    CH Web Design Northern Beaches
    April 6th, 2008 5:14 pm

    Great icons they’re so crip even tho they’re really small, theres a real art to doin this that i ahve not master yet!

  34. 34
    Liane
    November 27th, 2008 3:02 am

    im nuts with big nuts, i love saying that XD,

  35. 35
    Lou
    November 27th, 2008 12:00 pm

    Tammy, You have a lovely site with so many wonderful accolades.,

  36. 36
    gawsblog
    September 24th, 2009 10:01 am

    Hello very nise site i am grabbihg your favicon for my blog

  37. 37
    loekman
    October 30th, 2009 3:12 am

    THanks! It’s Very good!

  1. 00

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