- A favicon is not one image — it is a small set: legacy
favicon.ico, PNG sizes for tabs and bookmarks, and one large PNG for home-screen and PWA icons. - Generate them from a square, high-contrast source. Detail that reads well at 512px turns to mud at 16px.
- The
.icostill matters: plenty of crawlers, feed readers and older browsers ask for that exact filename. - Watch the padding knob. A logo that touches the canvas edge looks cropped in a tab; a few percent of padding fixes it.
The favicon is the smallest asset on a site and the most visible one: it appears in every browser tab, every bookmark bar, and increasingly in chat previews. It is also the asset people most often ship wrong — a single 512px PNG dropped in as favicon.ico and declared done, which produces a blurry tab icon and a 404 for the tools that ask for the real thing.
The sizes that actually matter
| Asset | Where it shows up | What happens if you skip it |
|---|---|---|
| favicon.ico (16/32/48) | Browser tabs, bookmarks, legacy crawlers. | Some readers show a generic globe instead of your mark. |
| png 32x32 | Modern tab rendering on high-DPI screens. | The 16px icon gets upscaled and looks soft. |
| png 180x180 | iOS home screen, some social previews. | Saved-to-home-screen shortcuts get a screenshot instead of an icon. |
| png 512x512 | PWA manifest, Android install prompt. | The install prompt degrades to a placeholder. |
Generating the set
Start from a square source
A wide logo will be padded or squashed. Crop to a square first so the mark is centred.
Generate locally
Run the generator in the browser: the logo is resized on your machine, so an unreleased brand mark is never uploaded.
Tune padding, then look at the 16px preview
Judge the smallest size, not the biggest. If it is unreadable at 16px, simplify the mark or drop the wordmark.
Drop the files in and reference them
Put the .ico at the site root and link the PNGs explicitly; the HTML snippet the generator gives you covers the standard tags.
Browser-only, private
Free Favicon Generator
Generate favicon.ico and common PNG favicon sizes locally from a logo, icon, or source image.
Free Favicon Generator
Runs locally in your browser, no upload. Load it to start.
Test the tab, not the file
The final check is not the download, it is the browser tab at a normal window width. Stand two metres away from the screen: if you cannot tell what the mark is, the icon is too detailed.
Frequently asked
Can I just use a PNG as favicon.ico?
You can point the link at a PNG, but the file named favicon.ico is still requested by convention. Shipping both costs nothing and removes a class of 404s.
Why does my favicon not update?
Browsers cache icons aggressively. Hard-reload, or open the icon URL directly to confirm the new file is being served.
Does generating cost Pixal3D credits?
No. The generator runs locally in your browser. Credits only apply to generating new 3D models on the AI 3D generator.
Next steps
Once the icon is in place, the same local-first approach covers your other assets: check a page in the GLB inspector, convert models on the GLB to STL tool, or generate one on the image-to-3D generator. The format decision table is in the GLB vs STL vs OBJ guide.