I was just redoing my favicon and thought I would share the process with those not familiar (yes I will get back to some ComicPress specific stuff soon). The “favorites icon” is the little icon that appears next to a URL in your web browser’s address bar, as well as in your bookmarks/favorites listing (where it got the name) and now it also appears on tabs for tabbed browsing.

To create one, you just need to create a 16×16 image. Pixel art!

Here is my 16×16 file, since my design didn’t use the whole square,
I created it with transparency, makes it look pretty slick on the tab
bars when you can see shading behind it.

Most image editing software does not save in ICO format, which is what you will need to do. You can find and download some freeware to do this. But I personally just save my image as GIF and then use this web service to convert it, it’s really handy. You just select the file from your drive and then you get a download link. An animated and transparent version will be in the sub folder of the downloaded ZIP file called “extra”.

Then you make sure the file is named “favicon.ico” and you upload that to the root folder of your site. Here’s how my icon looks in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Notice how the transparency shows up on the tabs. Itsa Niiiiiiiiice.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Web Developer Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.