Every website needs a favicon, if for no other reason than to avoid littering your server logs with 404 errors. If you still haven't got a favicon on your site, check out Faviconist, a new favicon generator from developer Michael Mahemoff.
Faviconist is built on two basic premises, that you shouldn't need Photoshop just to create a favicon, and that most favicons are just a letter on a background color. As Mahemoff writes on his blog, Faviconist is for "the 95% of people who don’t want to micro-design their icons; the rest will still need to resort to PhotoShop."
Once you've got your favicon looking the way you'd like just click the "save favicon" button on Faviconist will generate some cut and paste code you can drop into your pages. If you prefer to host the image yourself, just right-click the image and save it.
Even if you don't need to generate a new favicon, the site is still well worth exploring just to see what can be done with the HTML5 Canvas tag and client-side processing. In fact, the only thing that's done server-side is converting a .png file to the .ico format favicons use. Node.js, Kaffeine, JQuery and Google Fonts are among the other tools Faviconist relies on to design and generate icon files. Be sure to check out Mahemoff's blog for more details on how Faviconist works.
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