Favicon maker
The little picture in the browser tab. Drop your logo in and get every size a laptop, a phone and a bookmark bar quietly expect.
- It all happens here
- Every part runs in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, and it works with the internet off.
- No account, ever
- No sign-up, no email address, no trial that turns into a bill.
- Yours to use
- Nothing watermarked, nothing limited to a preview.
Your picture
A square PNG or SVG works best.
Use the mark, not the whole logo. At sixteen pixels the words in a logo become a grey smudge, and every smudge looks the same. The one distinctive shape — the symbol, the first letter, the animal — is what people recognise.
What you will get
Six files and a manifest — the browser tab icon, the one iPhones put on a home screen, the two Android reads, a version with room around it for launchers that crop to a circle, and the multi-size .ico browsers ask for whether you link to it or not.
Plus the exact lines to paste, in plain HTML and in the form modern frameworks expect.
What this is, if you have never had to think about it
Most people arrive here having been told they need one of these, without being told what it is. Nothing below assumes you already know.
What a favicon actually is
It is the tiny picture beside a page’s name — in the browser tab, in your bookmarks, in the list of suggestions when somebody starts typing your address. It is about sixteen pixels across in the place it appears most, which is roughly the size of a full stop on this page. That is the whole design brief: it has to survive being that small.
Why one file is not enough any more
A tab wants a small square. A phone saving you to its home screen wants a much bigger one, with no transparency, because iOS puts it on a coloured tile. Android wants one with room around the edges so it can crop it into a circle without cutting your logo in half. A browser showing a shortcut on a new tab page wants something in between. They all want different files, which is why a proper favicon is a set of about six things and a small text file listing them — and why generating it by hand is nobody’s idea of an afternoon.
The one design decision worth making
Your full logo, with the words, almost never works. At sixteen pixels the words become a grey smudge and the smudge looks identical to everybody else’s smudge. Take the one distinctive shape out of your logo — the mark, the first letter, the animal — and use that alone. Then squint at the preview: if you cannot tell it apart from the tab beside it, simplify again.
Questions people ask
A tab icon is the smallest part of looking real.
My Site is the rest of it — pages you can move around without touching code, your own web address, and the padlock beside it taken care of. The favicon you just made drops straight in.
