A Favicon is a little custom icon that appears next to a website's URL in the address bar of a web browser. They also show up in your bookmarked sites, on the tabs in tabbed browsers, and as the icon for Internet shortcuts on your desktop or other folders in Windows. And when I say little, I mean 16 pixels by 16 pixels. So if you like a good design challenge try your hand at this one.
All you need to add a Favicon to your site is a Windows Icon (.ico) file usually called favicon.ico that you upload to the main directory of your website. Nowadays, most browsers besides Internet Explorer can use a GIF (including animated ones) or PNG (including full transparency) instead. But since all browsers including IE understand the .ico format, and because it's got a lot of intriguing features that GIFs and PNGs don't, read on to find out how to make one.
Download The Plugin
You'll need the Windows Icon (ICO) file format Photoshop Plugin to export to the .ico file format. You can download the plugin from Telegraphics (temporarily unavailable - try here for now). The plugin reads and writes ICO files in 1, 4 and 8-bit Indexed and 24-bit RGB modes, and also reads and writes 32-bit "XP" icons (with 8-bit alpha channel). Make sure to install the plugin before you begin this tutorial.
Let's Begin
Because 16 x 16 is such a small canvas area, it can be very difficult to be creative. So instead start your project with a canvas set at 64 x 64 (always use even multiples when you plan on resizing files). Do this by selecting File>New, and opening a new canvas that is 64 x 64 pixels in size.
The Design
If you already have a logo you should reduce it to the 16 x 16 size to see if it holds up. If it doesn't look good at this size, work with the 64 x 64 canvas and try creating a simple design that incorporates colors from your website's palette.
When you're ready to test the design select Image>Image Size menu and enter 16 x 16. Click on Resample Image and choose "Bicubic Sharper" from the drop-down menu (CS only for this step). This is the best setting for making sure that an image doesn't blur as it's being resized. If it’s still not sharp enough, go back and oversharpen, oversaturate and/or heighten the contrast of the original image and then resize it again.
If you feel the icon is not quite what you wanted, just keep tweaking it until it is perfect. At this tiny size it can take a few tries before you get it right.
Saving The Custom Icon
Go to File>Save As and make sure you name the file favicon.ico. Under Format you must choose Windows Icon (ICO) from the pulldown menu. This format will only be available in Photoshop after you download and install the plugin. In the next step you'll need to upload this new file to the root folder of your website, so it's a good idea to navigate and save it to that location on your hard drive now.
Uploading The Favicon.ico File
Connect to your server and upload your Favicon.ico file to your website. You must place it into the same directory as your home (index) page, and leave it loose, making sure not to put it in an images directory or other folder. The standard location is the “root” folder of your site, which is same directory as your home (index) page, not inside an images directory or other folder. If you put it there (and name it favicon.ico), most browsers will find it automatically.
Some browsers will look for a direct link in the HTML source code to your site's favicon.ico file. You can help these browsers by adding this link in the head section of each page on which you want the Favicon.ico to appear.
Here is the link code to include:
Once you've added this code, upload all of your modified pages.
(Some people suggest that the following is actually more correct: You can use both if you want!)
If you want to use a GIF or PNG instead, use this format instead (just remember that it won’t work in IE):
or
Testing
If your new Favicon does not show up right away, try refreshing the page or clearing your cache — or put a '?' at the end of the url, which will trick a browser into thinking the page is new and not cached.
Troubleshooting
Browser Issues: Microsoft IE 6 for Windows will not display the favicon until the URL has been added to the favorites. Or try this trick: go up to the address bar, click on the existing (usually the IE default) favicon, then "jiggle" it a bit and let go. That will reload the page and should get the new favicon to show up.
Safari for the MAC will not display an updated favicon until the browser cache has been cleared. But choosing ‘empty cache’ from the menu won't help because Safari stores favicons in a separate cache. Go to Edit > Reset Safari, and check “Remove all website icons”. If you can’t find that, you must empty the icon cache yourself. Look for it in User>Library>Safari>Icons. On the Windows version of Safari, find C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari\WebpageIcons.db. Quit Safari, delete the file, restart Safari. (Sometimes you need to restart the computer too.)
On FireFox, clear the cache and restart the browser. On Opera, just refresh.
Windows can actually be the most beligerent about not updating favicons for Internet shortcuts (on your desktop, for instance). This tip from www.vistax64.com/tutorials:
1. Right-click on the Desktop.
2. Select Personalize and select Display Settings (or simply Settings on XP).
3. Change the Color from 32 bit to 16 bit and click Apply.
4. Change the Color back to 32 bit and click Apply.
File Format Not Available: The Windows Icon (ICO) file format will not be available until you have downloaded and installed the plugin, and then Quit and Restarted Photoshop.
Troubleshooting Update
One person who had trouble with Internet Explorer 7 has sent us a little tip:
I had some trouble with IE 7 — but the addition of these 2 lines of code solved the problem:
I found the info here:
www.webmasterworld.com/html/3251565.htm
Multi-Resolution Favicons
So if you’ve gotten this far, you can already see your favicon in your browser’s address bar, and it probably looks great. Feeling ambitious and want to go one step further?
In Windows especially, favicons show up all over the place. For instance, if you put a shortcut to a website on your desktop, Windows often uses the favicon of the site as the shortcut icon. But on the desktop, Windows uses a much larger size icon, usually 48x48 pixels. When this happens, Windows has to scale up your favicon and it will probably look blurry and not so great anymore.
You can fix this. One of the neat things about .ico files is that they can contain multiple versions of the icon, at different sizes and color depths (kinda like an animated GIF contains multiple frames). When they do, Windows uses whichever size and color depth is most appropriate. For the sizes, 16x16, 24x24, 32x32 & 48x48 pixels are most common, and all can put bundled together in a single .ico file.
Creating a multi-resolution icon isn't much harder than what you did to create your 16x16 favicon, Telegraphics, the same place you got your favicon plugin, also has another plugin http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/info/icobundle.html (temporarily unavailable) that allows you to bundle multiple icons together in a single .ico file. (There are also many standalone tools that will create a multi-resolution icon for you from a single starting image. Here's a couple that are free to try: www.sibcode.com/icon-studio and www.aha-soft.com/anytoicon.)
As for color depth... again, if you're on Windows, you may have noticed before that some icons on your desktop have jaggedy (aliased) edges, while others blend smoothly on the edges. The smooth blending is because those icons contain a version with 32-bit color depth, which allows true transparency, just like your layers in Photoshop. You can create a 32-bit version of your icon, along with 24-bit (16 million colors, gif-like transparency), 16-bit (256 colors) or even 8-, 4- or 2-bit... all of which could again be stored in one .ico file!
So if you want to make sure your favicon looks great wherever people might see it, try creating a few versions in your favicon.ico file. For example:
16x16, 16-bit (256) colors
16x16, 32-bit colors
32x32, 16-bit (256) colors
32x32, 32-bit colors
48x48, 16-bit (256) colors
48x48, 32-bit colors
But don’t go too crazy, because every variation makes your favicon a little bit bigger, which means it will take longer to download.
Inspiration
If you need some inspiration have a look through this nice collection of favicons. Also look at the nice categorized list of 50 remarkable favicons at Smashing Magazine. You might find something that triggers an idea for your own.
That's it. Enjoy your Favicons!
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