Recently I faced the problem of either creating my own 16 square pixel icons, or use others. I started looking into how other services have solved the problem, and I realized after looking at Socialthing! that the best solution is also the most obvious and simple one: Just import the site’s own favicons!
Here are some examples of great 16×16 icons from well known sites:
- Facebook:
- Last.fm:
- CNN:
- Yahoo!:
- Twitter:
Almost all bigger sites out there have a favicon, so to find and download an icon just do the following:
- Enter root web adress in your browsers adress field: http://www.sitename.com
- Apply /favicon.ico to the adress, like so: http://www.sitename.com/favicon.ico
- Hit Enter to go to the adress, and there you are. This is the perfect 16px icon for the website you’ve entered!