the highs & lows of the favicon

that little 16 x 16 pixel square that sits in the url bar to the left of the website address isn’t very important to some people, to others – it’s something to sweat over, discuss and argue over. google changed their favicon a couple of months ago, i noticed to be honest wondered why they changed it, i wasn’t impressed with the new design and thought the old design was better – but that’s where it stopped. a few other people went a bit further, quite a few actually – i did a google search for ‘google changes favicon‘ and got back over 810,000 results.

the reason i started this post was that earlier this evening i was updating my site and adding some links from a couple of design networking websites that i have been signing myself up to recently, namely behance network, linked in and coroflot. so far coroflot is my favourite for functionality and design – but that’s another post, the one thing that coroflot does let itself down on is their favicon. it seems like it has no relevance to the website, it’s a pair or cherries that is not featured anywhere else on the website – it’s not part of their logo, the colour of the cherries isn’t even a part of the site’s colour scheme. i use the favicon’s on my site as bullet points, but decided against using the cherries from the coroflot site and used an upside-down heart that they use on their banners and badges (see above).

you can check out what’s hot and what’s not in the world of favicon design here [http://thefavicongallery.com] and if you want to have a go at creating one, i use and recommend this website; http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon.