Make a full favicon set from a logo, emoji or letters.
A favicon set is a handful of files, and each one answers a different request. favicon.ico holds three sizes in one file, 16, 32 and 48 pixels, and is what a browser asks for when a page names no other icon. favicon-16x16.png and favicon-32x32.png are the same picture as separate PNG files for browser tabs and bookmarks. apple-touch-icon.png is 180 by 180 pixels and is used when someone adds your site to an iPhone or iPad home screen. android-chrome-192x192.png and android-chrome-512x512.png are the icons a web app manifest points to, for the Android home screen and install prompts. site.webmanifest is a small JSON file that names your site, gives its theme colour and lists those two Android icons. This tool makes all seven files at once and puts them in one zip, and shows the five lines of HTML that tell a browser where to find them, ready to copy.
Unzip the pack and upload the seven files to the root folder of your site, the same place the home page lives, so that /favicon.ico and /site.webmanifest open in the browser. Then paste the copied snippet inside the head element of your pages, between the opening and closing head tags. The paths in the snippet start with a slash, so they point at the root. If your files sit in a sub-folder, edit the paths in the snippet and in site.webmanifest to match before you upload. Browsers keep favicons for a long time, so a new icon may not appear straight away: reload the page without the cache, or open the icon's address on its own, to check that the new file is the one being served.
An emoji is a quick way to get a recognisable icon without a logo. Type or paste one emoji and the tool draws it as text on your background colour at every size, rather than shrinking a big picture, so small icons stay as clean as the device allows. The emoji comes from your own device's emoji font, which means a rocket on a Mac, a Windows PC and an Android phone looks different from one device to the next. What you see in the preview is exactly what goes into the files: the icons are saved as pictures, so they will not change on other people's screens. If you paste several emoji, only the first is used. Letters work the same way: one or two characters in bold type, in a colour chosen for contrast against the background unless you pick your own.
The icons are drawn and packed in this tab by your browser's own image code. There is no upload step and no server that receives your logo. An SVG is turned into a picture by the browser without fetching anything from the network. The page counts visits with Google Analytics, using only the name of the tool and the fact that a result appeared, never your image, your letters or your site name. Letters, emoji and site name are not saved either: close the tab and they reset, while colours and the crop or pad choice are remembered in this browser. This tool does not make animated favicons, SVG favicons or Windows tile files, and it does not check how your site's server or CMS serves the files.
It is the file a browser requests from the top of your site, at /favicon.ico, when a page does not name an icon. Ours holds 16, 32 and 48 pixel versions in one file, so older browsers and tools that ignore the PNG links still get a sharp icon at the size they need.
At least 512 by 512 pixels, and square if you can. The biggest icon the tool makes is 512 pixels, so a 256 pixel logo gives a soft 512 file and the tool tells you so. A non-square image is either cropped to a centred square or padded with your background, whichever you choose.
Usually yes. If the CMS asks for one site icon, check which size and format it wants and pick the matching file; android-chrome-512x512.png is the largest. If you can edit the head of your pages or upload files to the root of the site, upload all seven files and paste the snippet. Some platforms resize the icon themselves, so check what size they ask for.
iOS paints transparent areas of a home-screen icon black. When your picture has transparency, the 180 pixel file is filled with your background colour, or white if you chose transparent, and the tool says so. The 16, 32, 192 and 512 pixel icons keep their transparency.
Each device draws emoji with its own font. The icon files are pictures made on your device, so they look the same everywhere they are shown. Only a new run on a different device, for example a Windows PC instead of an iPhone, gives a different drawing of the same emoji.