Saturday, July 03, 2010

New Website Favicon

I was never really sure what to use for my website's favicon.  My website does not really have a unified theme.  It's just a hodgepodge of stuff, with so many more things (like old poetry and short stories) waiting to be added when I have enough free time

I created davidvs.net in the middle of 2008.  This was long before I started using Facebook in March of 2009, so in my mind one purpose of my website was to help old friends I had lost touch with find me online.  Although I did not want my website to pridefully shout "look at me!" I did want it to say "this is the David you were looking for".

Not sure what else to do, I used a shrunk version of that picture of myself as the favicon.  Although I did not like to emphasize myself, the tiny picture was not really recognizable, so I let it be.  You can see it in the tab bar of this screenshot.


A couple weeks ago I had a better idea.  Way back when I was at UCSB as a math graduate student and also rewriting the UCSB Math for Elementary School Teachers class to match then-current State Framework, I designed a pretty pattern block design while at one of Phyllis Chinn's PROMPT conferences.


(You can steal the svg file if you want to use Inkscape to play with pattern blocks!)

I could use this design, or perhaps one I liked more.  I played around with my pattern blocks and could not make anything I liked better.  I took a photograph of my three favorites with that same overall shape.  The one on the left is nice but slightly too busy.  The central design is too symmetrical, like a science fiction naval logo.


So yesterday I made that oldest design into that svg file, and then as best I could into an icon.  The shapes get very distorted when shrinking the entire arrangement to fit a 16 by 16 pixel grid.


But that idea for an icon did not even last a day!  While falling asleep last night, I thought of an even better idea.

A favicon is an ideal place to put BS"D.  Sure, it will confuse people.  But an unrecognizable tiny image did too, so my website is no worse off.

So this morning I used an online favicon generator and made a new icon.


Ta da!  Now my website gives God credit for his inspiration.

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