Favicons
Designing favicons is harder than you would think. A favicon gives you only a 16px X 16px square to work with, and it can be quite difficult to fit any sort of design into that small of a space. I totally sympathize with the guys at Google and their pretentious new lowercase Web 2.0 “G” logo. They’ve gotten a lot of negative criticism on the new logo, but think how hard it was to come up with that. The letter G is their only identifying symbol, and they’d already gone through so many iterations of it, and by making it lowercase they hoped to project an image of being less corporate. Not to mention the fact that its infinity symbol appearance symbolizes the huge amount of data their site helps to organize!
I got lucky with my hippo icon. I just used an online site to convert it to an .ico and amazingly, the vector graphic is still legible even at that small a size.
The Cinematic Titanic logo was much more difficult. The show’s logo has the silhouettes of five people and the time tube in it around the show’s title. That is waaay too much information to fit into 16px square. Just the scaffolding gets blurry and distorted beyond recognition at that size.
I tried a lot of variations on the letters CT, and on just Joel Hodgson’s head in silhouette. But just the letters were too simple to be a logo, especially since the show logo’s font is just a plain sans serif. And just Joel’s head looks like a dot, which is boring. And just the time tube looks like a hamster dropping. Sigh.
Several other people submitted designs too. They all had something good going for them, but none was quite right. Just letters are boring, but there aren’t any good singular icons to represent the show and its shadowrama style and movie content.
Time was running short, so I tried just one more time to incorporate everyone’s opinions into one logo design. And apparently 8th time’s the charm! My final logo submission was the one chosen to represent the Cinematic Titanic website in people’s bookmark lists and browser tabs. I am very proud of this tiny pixel graphic! The logo looks like this: 
and is viewable as a favicon at the Cinematic Titanic website.
I can’t imagine what else would work. Like a lot of things, its only the obvious soulution after you finally came up with it. Great persistence on a tricky little problem.
Comment by laelialee — June 30, 2008 @ 4:46 pm