How to Use an Emblem for Favicon Design

A graphic designer’s job is very complicated. Even a few years ago, clients used to ask the designers to create a logo that is scalable and can fit their business cards or brochures, but with changing technology, now they are asking designers to create an emblem that can be used as a favicon.

What is a favicon? It’s the small mark that you see in the web browser when you open a new website. The mark is generally shown in the address bar or at the left side of the tab.  A favicon is as small as 16×16 pixel dimension. Creating a visible mark at such a low resolution is certainly a challenging task. There are some options that a designer can apply while using a logo design for favicon design. Let’s take a look at them.

Show the Optimized Version of the Full Logo– If the brand logo design is simple then this option is viable. Make sure that the logo is made in vector so that you don’t lose the detail when you compress it for favicon design. This strategy has been applied by Hicksdesign.

Show a Part– Most corporate emblem designs are very complicated and contain both texts and symbols. Therefore, instead of compressing the entire design, you can take a distinguishable part of the logo and use it to create the favicon. The visual resemblance will help the viewers immediately recognize the company. Twitter has successfully applied this technique.

Create Something Different– You can also treat it as a completely new brand identity item. Create something that showcases the corporate values of your company, but does not look exactly the same as the insignia. Flickr has applied this idea.

There is no doubt that favicons are highly important for branding purpose as they help people immediately identify a company. Favicons enhance brand value and maintain the corporate identity of a company across web.