Designing a Favicon for Ashbee Design

Finally I got my act together and designed a custom favicon for my blog. Did you notice?  Right up there in your url bar you'll see it. Right there in that teeny, tiny spot next to my blog's address! All 16 by 16 pixels of it.

It is a challenge to design for that size. I knew it was too tiny for clear letters and I have been searching my mind for an identifying image. I realized the answer was right there before my eyes! Ferns! I hope you saw my photographs yesterday of the ferns in my garden but additionally, I have done lots of posts about those ferns. I love watching them grow and so I started working with the fern fiddlehead image - but of course for 16 square pixels you have to simplify........

Here is where I began. Graphic and simplified......

I then cropped it to fill a square.....

 With this result.....

But then I looked at it in 16x16 size and knew it was too complicated....

I tried reversing the positive and negative space but it was still too cluttered in the tiny size.

So I simplified even more......

Made that one tiny and it had enough impact in the small scale to hold its own in that tiny corner.

Yes! I like it. I did a Google search and there are tons of sites that give the step-by-step on changing it in the blog. The only glitch I ran into was I followed the steps and nothing happened.  I refreshed, cleared my cache, tried again, gave up and decided to ask my daughter for help. Forgot about it and then a couple of days later it started appearing in my browser. So I guess they really in mean it when they say it will take awhile to appear!

My to-do list for bloggy design assignments is down one with a bunch to go.

• I need to figure out how to get rid of the blogger nav bar to report abuse. It still has the orange blogger logo.
• Design a site button.
• And figure out where everyone is getting the code for the pretty social media buttons customized to your site colors.