New Design + How to Make a Favicon

There are some changes happening to my blog!

First up, I changed my overall blog design!

I tried to make the design as simple as possible. I plan on adding some buttons along the sidebar where I'll showcase things like my home tour, recipes and my chalk painted pieces.

I also updated my favicon and thought I'd share a little tutorial on how to make one.

But first:

What is a favicon?

A favicon is the little icon that goes next to the url when you're viewing a web page.

Here's what mine looked like before:

Why do you need a favicon? 

You need a favicon to set your blog apart from the sea of other blogs out there. It's yet another way to personalize your space on the web. Whenever someone clicks over to your blog, they'll see your little icon next to it.

Plus, it looks really cool in Feedly:

My favicon also appears in my pins on Pinterest so every time someone sees my favicon, they know it's me!

I wanted to change up my icon because I got tired of the heart one I've been using. I chose a pink + sign because I thought it was cute and bold at the same time.

How to create a favicon

Creating a favicon is incredibly easy!

The size of a favicon is 16x16 pixels and must be saved as .png, .gif or .ico

To make my favicon, I actually just created a new design in PicMonkey and set it to 16x16 pixels.

From there, I picked a font and made the +, but there are so many other things you can do. I've seen logos and pictures being used a favicons and they look awesome. Personally, I chose my favicon because my blog name is so long and I really didn't have a logo created to fit within the 16x16 space. In the future, I might change my favicon to something more personal to my brand, but I like mine right now.

Making a favicon is a simple thing you can do to further brand your blog!