34.17 Favion Creation

20190629

A favicon (favourite icon) is the small (16x16 pixel) icon associated with a website that appears in a web browser’s tab. They are usually ico files though png and gif files are also supported by many browsers.

One way to create a favicon is to create an svg image file using, for example, inkscape:

$ inkscape favicon.svg

  # Create or edit the file.

$ file favicon.svg 

favicon.svg: SVG Scalable Vector Graphics image

Other transformations can convert it to the favicon.png of choice:

$ convert favicon.svg -resize 256x256 -fuzz 40% -transparent white favicon.png

$ file favicon.png

favicon.png: PNG image data, 256 x 256, 16-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced

I chose to also change the colours to suit a light and dark background better by negating the current colours and replacing white with the new dominant colour. The result can be seen in the tab bar above or by visiting https://mlhub.ai.

mogrify -fuzz 40% -negate -fill '#ff9966' -opaque white favicon.png

Now create a high quality set of icons within a single ico file, embedding a transparent png:

$ convert favicon.png -define icon:auto-resize="256,128,96,64,48,32,16" favicon.ico

$ file favicon.ico 

favicon.ico: MS Windows icon resource - 7 icons, 256x256 withPNG image
data, 256 x 256, 16-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced, 32 bits/pixel,
128x128, 32 bits/pixel

And now, place the image file at the root of the website to be found by any web browser.

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