Lea Verou had a dang genius idea to use an emoji as a favicon. The idea only recently possible as browsers have started supporting SVG for favicons. Chuck an emoji inside an SVG <text> element and use that as the favicon.
Here’s the one-liner in use:
<link rel="icon" href="data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns=%22http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%22 viewBox=%220 0 100 100%22><text y=%22.9em%22 font-size=%2290%22>🎯</text></svg>">Demo Project Demonstrating Emoji as a Favicon
I made a quick little demo project so you can see it at work. See the deployed project to actually see the favicons. That works in Firefox and Chrome. Safari only does those “mask” style icons in SVG so this doesn’t work there. Maybe it could though? I dunno I’ll let you try it.
Here’s a video in case you just wanna see it.
Related Concepts
- Ada Rose Cannon added a badge that can increment.
- Taylor Hunt dropped some code on how he uses the current Git branch name to create an SVG favicon (related to the “different favicon for development” idea)
- You could duck a
prefers-color-schememedia query in the SVG if you wanted to do something special for dark mode (although emojis generally work well on any background)