Google is reaching out to its users to help them create a favicon (the little icon you see next to the URL in your browser) for its site, admitting that “creating a favicon is really difficult.”

A couple weeks ago, I was shocked to see that Google had changed its old favicon, , to a blue lowercase ‘g’ on a gradient gray background (shown above). I still can’t bring myself to accept the change; after all, it’s been a part of my searching experience for the last eight and a half years.

Google claims the reason for the new favicon,  was to “develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices.” But even after 300 different designs, Google still isn’t satisfied.

“By no means is the one you’re seeing our favicon final; it was a first step to a more unified set of icons. However, we really value feedback from users and want to hear your ideas that we may have missed,” said Marissa Mayer and Micheal Lopez from Google.

So Google is now reaching out to its users to submit what they think would be the perfect Google favicon.

Maybe your idea will be the one that people see billions of times per day.

Favicons can be submitted to Google through http://www.google.com/faviconideas/, and must meet the following technical requirements:

• resolution: 16 pixel x 16 pixel image
• format: .png, .gif, or .ico
• size: 5 KB
• transparency: 32 bit alpha transparency

it appears that Google is additionally creating a favicon specifically for the iphone; 2 different icons appear on the Google Blog, one labeled ‘favicon mobile’ and the other labeled ‘favicon iphone’.

If you’re up to the challenge, I’ve found favicon.cc to be a great place to start. Images can be imported, scaled, and converted to a favicon, or you can try your hand at a freestyle design using a pen and color wheel.

Related:

Entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 12:52 pm under Google.

Read more entries by George Gardner.
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