Isaac Keyet

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:

1. Enter root web adress in your browsers adress field: http://www.sitename.com
2. Apply /favicon.ico to the adress, like so: http://www.sitename.com/favicon.ico
3. Hit Enter to go to the adress, and there you are. This is the perfect 16px icon for the website you’ve entered!