Smashing Magazine - we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.

The New Year’s Eve is a tricky time for designers. Some of us eagerly analyze deadlines, define milestones and refine the time schedule for the upcoming year. The other ones discover the need to update footers and copyright statements on their web-sites (by the way, have you actually replaced “2007″ with “2008″ in your footer?). Still, even on the January 1^st passionate designers continue to strive for inspiration in order to come up with fresh ideas for the ongoing projects.

If the latter is your case, is there really a better way to find the inspiration rather than in a fine gallery of excellent favicons – our not that secret and very lively passion? We’ve written a lot about favicons in the previous articles. If you’d like to find more inspiration or find out more about how they are actually created, take a closer look at the following articles and showcases:

• Part 1: Inspire Yourself: 50 Remarkable Favicons
• Part 2: Inspire Yourself: More Creative Favicons
• Part 3: Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful
• Part 4: Creative Favicons: Tiny Artwork

Below you’ll find more examples of an excellent favicon design; we’ve collected these delicate beauties over the last three months.

Please notice that the favicons weren’t chosen simply because of their beauty; it’s been important to us that the favicon perfectly fits to the overall site design. All favicons are linked to the sites where they are used — you can click on them to get more insights into how favicon design can be related to the layout design.

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

50 Excellent Favicon Designs

This time our favourite favicon is the one used on a Russian web-site called Coalla. It’s a logo (a cute koala coala bear) cut in two halfs. Though it’s simple and uses only black and white, it looks surprising and funny, and is both appealing and memorable. In this case the idea matters more than the design itself.

And here are 49 more excellent Favicons: