Favoring Icons

I’m slowing working through updating my site. Recently, I decided to update my icons. I’ve been using favorite icons for years—favicon.ico for those that care. But, it was old and boring. Time to update.

The world has progressed a bit though. At the dawn of App stores, web sites could add icons to those pristine phone and tablet pages. Those tiny little icons became passé. Fortunately, on this site at least, I had added one of those touch icons. It worked at the time. But, again, things changed.

With the advent of retina displays, you now need a couple of different versions of different shapes, sizes and what not. Of course, it wasn't just mobile devices. Computers and their browsers got more sophisticated as well. They too started to grab those icons and, well, things just look weird now without them.

In fact, it was Safari that I first noticed that all my pretty icons looked dull. Time to get cracking! I found some pictures and used Canva to build a nice image—was easier than cracking open Gimp. I now have a pretty icon, but now what? Crud, all those different sizes and such are just going to be a pain to generate. Or will they?

I'm off to my favorite search engine to search for what I need. I started digging around specifications of various companies, Apple being one of the first since that was my problem. After an hour of that, I finally landed on a favorite icon generator. “Nice!” I said. Time to plug and chug, and, voilà, I had a set of icons on my site. Sort of.

Although it worked, it was only a limited subset and things didn't quite update right. Then, come to find out, my favorite icon didn't work. Not to mention it was a subset of applications which left me with a less than stellar experience.

Time to search some more. I ran across a forum post on my favorite icon problem and, surprise, had a link to their icon generator. Unlike my first attempt, this was a one stop shop of perfection. It was almost overwhelming, but ended up exactly what I needed.

This brings me to today. I now have a nice set of icons for my main site. Not quite sure if I’m entirely happy with it, but it is much better than the old and feels, well, better. I’ll give it a week. Until then, let me know your own experiences in the comments.