Making a favicon

I just made a favicon for my website. What is a favicon? It’s that teeny tiny square icon thing-a-ma-jig next to the website URL, in the address bar of the web browser. Most big companies have them. If you bookmark some websites so you can get to them faster, the favicon can help you find them more quickly. This is because many people “read” visual images faster than words; it’s why we have many traffic signs with symbols on them rather than words.

I started out with this square chunk cropped from my logo:


In Photoshop, I saved it as a 16-pixel square image and resampled the image using the bicubic sharpener (this keeps the image from blurring as it is resized). Here’s how it looks blown up:

And here’s how it looks at actual size:


Cute! You can see how it looks in a web browser by going to my website, www.bluemoonriver.com

Have a website and want to make your own favicon? Here’s a great tutorial by Jennifer Apple on how to make one in Photoshop.