Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful
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:
40 Creative Favicons
(updated)
Le Tung Lam
June 14th, 2007 10:28 pmGreat Icon….
I think favicon of simplebits is also a beautiful icon.
Shankar Ganesh
June 14th, 2007 10:51 pmI wonder how you guys get around the web to collect these icons. You have collected many inspirational ones. Thank You.
Tony D. Clark
June 14th, 2007 11:23 pmGreat 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.
Goran Mitic
June 14th, 2007 11:25 pmI 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.
Arpit Jacob
June 14th, 2007 11:56 pmGreat Post but I think that you have been posted them before.
Ingo
June 15th, 2007 12:33 amthe icon listed for foolscap.de (16th from top) is not their’s. It’s the logo of TYPO3, the content management system!
Ingo
June 15th, 2007 12:34 amforgot the link: typo3.org
Tammy Wilson
June 15th, 2007 3:23 amI’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?
criticalerror
June 15th, 2007 4:16 amI’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!!!!
Matty
June 15th, 2007 8:21 amI thought it was 18px by 18px. I thought wrong =)
meizopan
June 15th, 2007 11:11 amwhen tiny be crative. awesome
Hitesh Mehta
June 15th, 2007 10:39 pmbeautiful collection…. !
OverZero.it
June 15th, 2007 11:40 pmYeah, very inspiring!
Narga
June 16th, 2007 12:50 amThat is good icons, very inspiring!
GreySheepDuo
June 16th, 2007 1:47 amWhy 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.
milo
June 16th, 2007 3:59 amYou guys love linkbait, do you?
Jeffrey
June 16th, 2007 8:12 ami think Meebo’s favicon should be on the list. Its pretty sweet.
Mandy
June 16th, 2007 9:07 amDavezilla.com has a really cool one! A tiny dragon with teeth!!
Arthur
June 16th, 2007 5:03 pmWell 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!
Rohit
June 16th, 2007 6:13 pmNice icons..How do they design it???
CAn anyone get one for my blog?
Alan Clifford
June 17th, 2007 2:06 amegobits.gif is 34 x 34 pixels.
–
Alan Clifford
Alan Clifford
June 17th, 2007 2:09 amhttp://www.smashingmagazine.com/favicon.ico is 32 x 32 pixels not 16 x 16
Alastair
June 17th, 2007 5:57 amBecause 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, 32x32px gif, <1k).
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.
Motorcycle Guy
June 18th, 2007 9:48 amWow some of these are really amazing. I think if you can design a good favicon you can design anything!
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?
krull
June 18th, 2007 5:29 pmtypo3.org FTW! :D
manish
June 19th, 2007 3:27 pmi 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 :-)
Martin S
June 19th, 2007 8:50 pmThe 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.
iddaa
June 21st, 2007 11:24 pmRealy great icons.
i will use as soon as possible.
Mostafa Darvishzadeh
June 22nd, 2007 3:50 amnot bad
i’m making an icon for my website ;)
Sebastian
July 2nd, 2007 4:03 pmAwsome collection, well done ;-)
Matty
July 31st, 2007 3:38 pmDid you know you can make your Favicon an animated GIF. I’m sure you can take the creativity a step further ;)
CH Web Design Northern Beaches
April 6th, 2008 5:14 pmGreat icons they’re so crip even tho they’re really small, theres a real art to doin this that i ahve not master yet!
Liane
November 27th, 2008 3:02 amim nuts with big nuts, i love saying that XD,
Lou
November 27th, 2008 12:00 pmTammy, You have a lovely site with so many wonderful accolades.,
gawsblog
September 24th, 2009 10:01 amHello very nise site i am grabbihg your favicon for my blog
loekman
October 30th, 2009 3:12 amTHanks! It’s Very good!
mathew
April 26th, 2011 11:06 ami like the design and content , thanks
logosmile
November 3rd, 2011 8:14 pmcheck this one http://graphicriver.net/item/favicon-generator-action/741740
hope will help