I gots me a Favicon

25 September 2003

Okay, so I got fed up with not having a favicon and made one. Now that I’m using Firebird as my weapon of choice, it becomes really noticeable when sites either do or do not have an icon, and it was bugging me that I fell into the ‘does not’ category. So now I have an icon. A finishing touch, if you will.

It’s been quite a while since I last had to convert a .gif to a .ico file, and couldn’t remember what software I last used. After a bit of searching around I found a free tool to do the job. I’m delighted to recommend Irfanview as the perfect get the hell on with it tool. No nonsense. Open, Save As, .ico, kthxbye.

As you may have noticed, I wasn’t brave enough to attempt a 256px armadillo. Maybe next time.

- Drew McLellan

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§ Nathan Pitman: I think I like the simplicity of this more than I would like an armadillo.
§ Drew: You creative types aren’t to be trusted ;)

(and anyway, you would like it, I learned most of it from you).
§ Alex: If your’re on a Mac ’GraphicConverter’ is a great bit of shareware, converts to every graphic format there is. The favicon looks great, by the way.
§ ben: You can create a bitmap - its gotta be 16x16 or 32x32 and then just rename the extension from .bmp to .ico. Works great. You can make ’em transparent and e’rything.
§ tomjleeds: Ben: That’s what I did. Nice and easy (allows you to use Photoshop as well).
§ Drew: Hey guys - I read that you couldn’t (or maybe shouldn’t?) just do that.

Anyone got a technical take on this?
§ ben: Drew - it makes sense that you shouldn’t (not couldn’t, because you definitely can) use the .bmp to .ico method in some situations because the ico file format determines whether to display a 16x16 or 32x32 image for a given situation. ie - in a windows save as dialog box, those are 16x16, on your desktop, they are 32x32. However, in my experience, if you make you icon a 32x32 pixel bitmap, it seems to look ok (not quite as good) when rendered as a 16x16 icon.
§ zlog: A ’lil birdy tells me you can also use pngs and (animated) gifs for favicons.

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About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan (@drewm) has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

All in the <head>