Favicons as Desktop Icons
I recently had a client request a favicon for their site. Normally this is no problem at all, but this time they added a bit of a twist that I didn't notice at first. As it caused me a small headache, I thought I would document here how I solved it for my own future reference.
The twist was that they wanted their customers to be able to drag the icon to their desktop to make a desktop link to their site. This is actually a feature of Internet Explorer, so it didn't provide any extra work there. The only problem is that a 16X16 favicon looks really bad when it is made into a 32X32 desktop icon.
The solution is to make an icon with multiple sizes. As it turns out, however, I tried a few different software packages to do this and none of them worked correctly.
What did work correctly, however, was a free page on Dynamic Drive. The Dynamic Drive FavIcon Generator did the trick easily. All I had to do was upload a small .gif image (it says it supports .jpg and .png as well, but I didn't test) and select the sizes that I want and it returns a nice, downloadable .ico file - easy does it!
