Design Within the Limits of Space
As you may have noticed, favicons are pretty small. Most favicons are 16px in size, as browsers universally accept this size and dimension. Although, favicons can be made bigger in certain use cases.
Glossary
Importance Of Building Brand Awareness, Image, and Name
What are Favicons?
Simply put, favicons refer to the small, distinct image that represents your website on the internet. Favicons are mostly found on the address bar where we enter the URL of the webpage, but they also appear as images on bookmarks, history results, tabs, toolbar apps, and search bars.
All successful websites have a distinct favicon that represents their theme, aesthetic, and style. Therefore, any budding online business or content creator must design their favicon. It gives your website a unique marker, a distinct image to remember it by. In this article, we have collated everything you need to know about favicons, how to create favicons, and how you can use them.
Building a Recognizable Brand Image
How To Create An Impactful Favicon
There are many factors to take into consideration when designing a favicon for your website. While they are simple graphic figures, they have and should have a significant impact on people. You must design an attractive favicon because often that is what people on the internet will remember your brand by. Following are a few tips and tricks to keep in mind while designing your favicon.
Keep it Simple
Since favicons are so small, it is ideal to keep the design simple. This means avoiding designs that have too many elements and colors to them. The trick to making a favicon is to stick with shapes, letters, and colors that are visually appealing and stand out on the internet.
Establish a Brand Image
We all recognize the famous favicons of tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Such is the power of their favicons that most of us remember these tech companies by this visual image. Therefore, you must design a favicon that leaves an impression. Something that instantly tells the user what your brand is all about. It can be hard to achieve such a massive directive in a minuscule image, but take it as an opportunity to unleash your creativity.
Abbreviations
A common way to design favicons is to use abbreviations. You can create short and catchy abbreviations of your brand name and add it to your favicon. You can play around with letters and designs to figure out what works best for you. Famous examples include Facebook and Wikipedia, both use the first letter of their brand as a visual favicon representation of their website.
Choose Colors Wisely
With limited space and design options, colors become a crucial factor. You need to choose colors that are visually pleasing and also uniquely represent the theme of your brand. Use color theory to your advantage. Contrasting colors work well and help the human eye to remember shapes and elements.
More Formatting And Design Tips
Favicon Image Sizing
Here are some technical details and examples when it comes to favicons, we are mainly talking about size guidelines and image formats. As we mentioned above, favicons are generally designed in the 16-x dimension. However, they can be enlarged to fit other areas. Here are some examples:
- 24px: Favicons of this size are usually found on pinned sites in Internet Explorer.
- 32px: Favicons of this size are used on the new tab page and taskbar on windows and Safari’s “read later” section.
- 57px: This is the standard size of icons on the iOS home screen (older generation iPhone and iPod)
- 72px: Size of icons on the iPad home screen
- 96px: Favicons found on Google TV.
- 114px: Size of favicons found on the newer iPhones (fourth generation and above)
- 128px: Size of favicons found on the Chrome Webstore.
- 195px: The largest among all favicons. They are found on Opera’s speed dial.
With all these tips and tricks, we hope that you will be able to design an appropriate and attractive favicon for your brand. In the rush of designing a website and online presence, we often forget that it is these small details that matter the most.
Comparing Image Formats and File Types
Information Of What Image Formats To Use
There are different browsers and platforms on the internet, each with its formatting guideline. We have compiled a useful list with all the possible formats you need to design your favicon in.
- Windows ICO: It's easy to design favicons in Windows ICO because they are widely supported across multiple platforms. Designers and website creators choose to make their favicons in Windows ICO because it makes it easy to change the resolution of the image without destroying the image quality. Furthermore, the image created in the program works beautifully on Windows apps and browsers. Thus, the priority is an icon favicon for most businesses.
- PNG: This is another widely accepted and accessible format. There is no need to acquire and a special program to design images in this format. It allows the designer to create the smallest possible image and aids alpha transparency. The only drawback is that PNG images are not supported by Internet Explorer.
- SVG: This is a format that is exclusive to Opera. Images in this format are only supported by Opera browsers.
- GIF: This format is not preferred by most designers when creating favicons. It can only be used on old browsers and is pretty outdated. Moreover, the moving images make the favicon pretty distracting and often irritating.
- JPG: This is a format that is used to design favicons; however, it does not provide versatile and good quality images like PNG. Also, JPG is best used for larger images, therefore is not well suited for making favicons.
- APNG: This is known as the animated version of the PNG. While it is supported by Opera and Firefox, it suffers from the same issues as GIF. The constantly animated images are distracting and are likely to put people off from concentrating on what they are doing online.
With all these tips and tricks, we hope that you will be able to design an appropriate and attractive favicon for your brand. In the rush of designing a website and online presence, we often forget that it is these small details that matter the most.