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:
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.
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!
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