Friday, July 21, 2006

GSD's New Favicon!

Since I have been playing with icons so much lately, I finally decided to do something about making a favicon for the "Grand Stream Dreams" blog.

If you are not familiar with what I am talking about, a favicon is a personalized bookmark icon for a webpage. IE 6 is kinda cranky about displaying them, but I hear IE 7 works fine. Firefox handles them no problem!

One of the challenges in making a favicon is that they are at 16x16 pixel size. That makes it very challenging to create a graphic that is clean and visible at that size.

It took me a fair amount of work but I got one created that I was happy with and added some text to it.

You can do it by hand like I did, or you can use a service like Chami.com's FavIcon from Pics: the first web tool for creating still / animated favicons from regular images

Next I had to upload the icon image file to a hosting site. Blogger/Blogspot doesn't handle .ico/.gif formats that it needs to be in. I tried using my flckr account, but that also changed the file format at upload. Finally I discovered the clever and nice site Photobucket.com. They provide free image and video hosting in a format that is very helpful to bloggers.

Once I had uploaded the file, I had to add some HTML code to my blog's template and voilla! Done!

Hope you enjoy it!

More icon links:

Anime icons/avatars
Large format, Last Exile icons - via Fleet of Little Ships


Update--favicon v2.0 Thanks Jim!

See you in the skies,
--Claus

2 comments:

Jim said...

Nice icon, but when it's shrunk to 16x16, the text is illegible. I'd lose the text and the right ear and close in tighter on the face.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Jim,

I found a different image in my pile and then did some bmp editing to bolden up the lines--coloring book style.

I did a tighter crop of the face like you suggested. Once that was done I scaled it down into 16x16 format.

Then I pulled it into my icon editor and tweaked the color pixels a final time to re-enhance the lines where the resize process washed them out.

Whew! I think your suggestion makes it look much better!

Thanks for the tips!