Google's Favicon

[tedster]

This is not a big deal, but given Google's quality in most things, I'm amazed at how amateurish their favicon looks. It catches the corner of my eye when it's displayed on the Opera tab and I get this repeated impulse to improve it, as if it was one of my sites that was open and I just noticed a bad result that needs fixing.

As a friend of mine says, "What's up widdat?"

[Sinner_G]

I can't see any Google Favicon. I get only the same icon as a blank page. What do you see tedster?

[tedster]

A blue capital G inside a square. I use Opera all the time and it displays the favicon in the address bar and on the tab.

[DerekH]

I agree it's not all that minimalistically stylish, but then again, who can surpass the ALT= on their little spheres...

DerekH

[TheDave]

I've noticed it's pretty ugly, but I wonder whether they are trying to minimize the palette? A bit of anti-aliasing wouldn't go astray

[takagi]

Originally it should be a 16x16 pixel image with the standard 4 bit windows colors. No wonder it looks amateurish.

[MonkeeSage]

Reminds me of a Win 3.1 icon...

Jordan

[MonkeeSage]

Hmmm...I don't see any place where the icon is listed...how do they get their favicon to show up without the metas for it? Is it possible to send a favicon server side or something?

Jordan

[keyplyr]

how do they get their favicon to show up without the metas

Actually, it's only necessary to have the favicon.ico in the root directory for most browsers. The meta tag enables alternate names/paths to be used. However, there have been several in-depth discussion about it in the past that tend to put more importance on the meta tag.

[MonkeeSage]

Interesting. :)

Jordan

[netcommr]

blow that thing up 10x, what a mess

[Sinner_G]

Which Opera version are you all using? I can't see any icon (Opera 7.11).

[amznVibe]

Um, way easier to see: [google.com...]

[Sinner_G]

Eeeeek, really ugly. But still strange I don't see it on the tab.

[mundonet]

The outline is the bad part.

[amznVibe]

If you have ever tried to make a 16x16 icon, you'll appreciate just how hard it is to do. I try to make a basic favicon for every site I design for my clients just to be complete, but its one of my least favorite tasks.

I usually start with a 160x160 box in PhotoImpact or PhotoShop and once done, I resize gradually down to 16x16. Takes quite a bit of trial and error.

They had a smilie making contest here with similar constraints in size and colors and I wasn't very impressed with even the winning results.

[futuresky]

I you can't see the favicon in your opera tabs, try clicking on:

File---->Preferences---->Multimedia

Then in the drop-down box marked "Page icons", select "Show all icons".

[dragonlady7]

>who can surpass the ALT= on their little spheres.

I hadn't seen this.

So funny!

I agree, making icons is HARD. We've had to do it here for some of the software our company makes, and it takes FOREVER. It can be done, but 16x16 is just brutal. There's no room for anything. I don't really mind the Google one... I don't really look at those anyway.

[MonkeeSage]

Just bored...amusing myself...html rendition of the Google favicon...

.icon {
border-top: 1px solid #11CC33;
border-left: 1px solid blue;
border-bottom: 1px solid #11CC33;
border-right: 1px solid red;
width: 16px;
height: 16px;
background: white;
color: blue;
text-align: center;
}
.text {
position: relative;
top: -1px;
font: 15px Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, Serif;
font-weight: bold;
}

<div class="icon"><span class="text">G</span></div>

Jordan

[dragonlady7]

LOL MonkeeSage! Well done!

[killroy]

Reminds me of my asm game programming days when I designed pixel fonts for 320x200 and 256x256 resolutions.. was fun fun fun, but also an art in itself.

SN