The Life Cycle of a Favicon

There are people who make amazing icons for a living and I’m not one of them. I did, however, find myself needing a favicon. Creating a legible representation of a complex object with 16×16 pixels is harder than it looks.

Simply resizing a photo to the size of an icon doesn't work. It doesn't look like anything (#2).

Illustrating a simpler, stylized version yields an icon that can be used at relatively small sizes, but not all the way down to 16×16 (see the washed-out result shown in #4).

The final step is to exaggerate the most prominent features so they can be seen even at tiny sizes.