As some of you may have noticed, I have updated my favicon. In case any of you are not aware what this is, the favicon.ico file denotes the image that displays next to the title of the page in either the bookmarks / favorites list, or on the page’s tab for tabbable browsers.

If you look at the active tab as you read this, you should see that my favicon is: .

Although there are many generators out there that will allow you to draw your favicon on their website and then download the favicon.ico file, these usually produce low quality favicons as they have to be drawn using primitive means. Yet a further annoyance for designers, or anyone fortunate enough to have a copy of photoshop, the filetypes that you are allowed to save to in photoshop do not include the .ico. To my knowledge, this is regardless of the version of photoshop, beit Photoshop CS2, Photoshop CS3, or Photoshop CS4.

Not being able to design my own favicon and save it in Photoshop was unacceptable, so I started looking for a way to make it happen. I found a few generators online that allow you to upload a JPG file and then download the converted ICO file, but because the ICO file is 16 x 16 pixels (not a very large canvas to work with) some strange compression took place which would alter the image making it different from what was uploaded and desired.

After searching a bit more, I came across this blog post > “Save As .ICO” plugin for Adobe Photoshop CS3. That led me to this site > Telegraphics – Free Plugins for Photoshop & Illustrator… and other software. Despite what the name of the article says (Photoshop CS3), and that I have only used this with Photoshop CS3, it is listed as working with other versions such as CS and CS2 as well as supporting various versions for MAC.

Best of all, the plugins are FREE. Please consider donating however.

That’s that, install the plugin as per the instructions and you’re off and running making your very own favicon.ico files in most, if not all versions of Photoshop.

Good luck!