Drilling Down On The Perfect Set of Favicons With Bill O’Connor Part II

Bill writes-

Joe,

Here’s a complete icon set in two flavors – yellow gradient background we’ll call ‘Sunrise’, and blue gradient background we’ll call ‘Daybreak’. Both icon sets are with lettering or without, and are rendered in the following sizes 16×16, 32×32, 48×48, 64×64, and 72×72.  72×72 is ipad sized.

You can bundle a set into one icon file (favicon.ico) that will allow systems and browsers to determine the best fit – instead of the one-size-fits-all approach.  I would suggest an icon bundle of one color where you use smaller icons with no text (16×16 & 32×32) and the rest of the larger icons in the bundle would have the GMG lettering.  Sort of a best of both world scenario.

Thanks,
~Bill O’Connor
North Shore Kid

Bill has been going above and beyond in helping to create the perfect favicon set for us.

OK now I’m going to start talking a little technical-

In case you don’t know why there are the different sizes provided in the set of favicons Bill sent, it is because the different sizes are recognized by browsers for placement on your device.

For example- the smallest ones are used in your browsers’ addresss bar up above or if you bookmark GMG in your Bookmarks Toolbar, the smallest favicon goes there.  If you add GMG’s bookmark to your iPhone, iPod Touch or Android Phone’s home screen, then the medium sized favicon is recognized automatically and placed as a button on your mobile device.   If you save a bookmark to GMG on your iPad’s home screen it will save the larger image as the button you would press to go directly to our blog.  So for the smaller ones where you are never going to be able to read the text because they are so tiny you can put the seagull without the text but on the favicon which would display larger and the text would be legible, you can add the GMG lettering below the seagull.  The way this is accomplished is by creating a file which contains each version of the different size you would like into one .ico file.  From wikipedia-

The ICO file format is an image file format for icons in Microsoft Windows. .ICO files contain one or more small images at multiple sizes and color depths.

I’m pretty sure we can toss out the yellow ones.  Even though they look nice, I’m all about branding and having it recognizable and changing our theme to yellow seems treasonous.  Right now I like the idea of the larger favicons with the GMG text below the seagull and and the smaller ones without but there are a few things that I think we need to be tweaked for perfection.

In the quest for the perfect set of favicons for GMG look for part III tomorrow where I ask for some tweaking to the set of favicons Bill produced which are shown above.

The adventure continues…