Making a favicon can be a real challenge if you have no direction. But with just a few simple steps, you can have a great favicon that brands your page and makes it easy to spot your site amongst a gallery of open tabs in someone’s browser.
Favicons are typically 16 pixels by 16 pixels, and that is how we are going to make ours.
Instructions to Making a Favicon
- Create the Master file. First, open your logo file in Gimp and save this project as “favicon.xcf”.
- Keep the Graphics. The graphics is typically the left most part of the logo. If this file has layers, delete the company name and tagline layers. If not, crop out all of this logo except the graphics part.
- Select the graphics. You can use the rectangular select tool to draw a rectangle around the graphics.
- Fit Canvas to selection. This is at “Image/Fit Canvas to Selection”.
- Make the canvas square. Open “Image/Canvas Size”. Whichever dimension is larger, make the smaller dimension identical.
- Scale to 16px. Open “Image/Scale Image”. Make sure the unit of measurement is “px” or “pixels”. Then set the width to 16. The length will automatically size to 16 as well.
- Export to an “.ico”. Click “File/Export” and change the file extension to “.ico” Do not adjust anything on this next window that opens. Simply click “export”.
- Check your work. Open your favicon file and make sure it looks correct.
- Save your master. Your done!
Creating a Favicon is Simple but Vital
Making a favicon is really fairly simple. It is such a differentiator. You can quickly spot an amateur website simply due to the lack of a favicon. Make your site stand out with completing this easy but important step.
