Digital Design , 12/15/16

Lab 8 , Favicons

Lesli Cuamani

This lab was primarily based on making a favicon for this webpage. It didn't have to be anything in specific but it should've been decent to show off. A favicon is an icon associated with a URL that is variously displayed. Favicons are small square images usually 16×16 pixels which are used by web browsers to show a graphical representation of the site being visited at the left side of the browser’s address bar. The main reason for having favicons nowadays is to improve user experience. Favicons are used in all modern browsers at the address bar, in the links bar, in the bookmarking area and in its browsing tabs. Besides that, a few browsers also show favicons whenever you create a shortcut link for the corresponding website in your desktop and your mobile device.

Creating a website favicon is easy as pie. As a matter of fact, you don’t even need to be a designer to do that. Surely it helps if you are, as you can put your skills to work and create something that really stands out, but even the less tech-savvy of us can do it in about 5 minutes or less, using the right tools. You can use online favicon generators that help you create the image that you want with the necessary measurements added to it.

For any format other than ICO, we need to point to it using the element in the of each page, with the appropriate rel and type attributes: ( < link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/pathto/favicon.png" /> ) This also allows us to change the favicon on sites we don't host, such as Tumblr or Blogger. Note that favicons don't need to be named favicon.ico or kept in the root of the site or application, but make sure you use the element, otherwise the browser will be making multiple requests to try and find it.

The relationship between a pixel and bit in this case is quite complex but understandable. A pixel is a picture element. It has various properties depending on the hardware and software used to manipulate it's display. It can have multiple colors, which require more than one bit of data to encode. It also has a position, and to refer to that position will require more than 1 bit. A bit is a single position in the base 2 number system. It is either a 1 or a 0. It's the building block of all computer processes and languages. A byte is a collection of bits, typically 8 of them, that can be used to describe things such as a character of text Hardware and Software that display text on the screen of a computer will use a combination of bits and bytes to determine what pixels should be turned on to display a character or other symbol on the screen.