16 Pixels of Brand.

The problem

“It has a favicon” turned out not to be the same as “it has the right favicon”.

The estate had accumulated several generations of browser identity. Some sites had bespoke SVG favicons. Some had old .ico fallbacks. Some had no committed favicon at all. One fallback had quietly inherited the Music Archive identity, while search engines and browser caches were still hanging on to even older marks from sites that no longer existed.

None of that breaks a page. It does, however, make a collection of deliberately different products look strangely interchangeable in tabs, history, bookmarks and search results.

The method

Treat the favicon as a tiny identity system rather than a file you remember at the end.

The pass started with a real inventory of what each production site was actually serving, including declared SVGs, root ICO fallbacks and missing assets. From there, every public surface got one deliberately unique mark grounded in its existing visual language.

The important review was not the attractive 256-pixel version. Each candidate was repeatedly reduced to 32 and 16 pixels. Fine detail disappeared, letterforms collapsed and several initially clever ideas became coloured porridge. Those were simplified until the mark still had a recognisable silhouette at the size people would actually encounter it.

The final implementation then made the source and fallback agree. Where a site declares an SVG, the root ICO now represents the same identity. Sites that previously relied on browsers guessing /favicon.ico now have a real, intentional fallback. Build-generated sites explicitly carry the asset into their output rather than hoping it survives the pipeline.

The estate

Eleven public surfaces, eleven deliberate identities.

The main domain keeps the DiscoMcDisco master mark. Work uses the restrained RWT identity. Music keeps its existing pixel-art mark exclusively. Cheesy Playlist, Clenchmere, DunDunSee™, DiscoMcPlays, Cranes That Crane Cranes, The Six-Year-Old Test, Dusty’s Favourite Foods and Impossible Logistics each now have their own small visual shorthand.

Sections inherit their parent rather than inventing more identities. The experiments area, for example, remains RWT because it belongs to the Work site. The aim was distinction, not favicon inflation.

The useful finding

The asset is only half the problem. Identity also has memory.

Once the files were correct, the remaining uncertainty moved outside the repositories. Browsers cache favicons aggressively. Search engines maintain their own favicon stores. A site can therefore be serving the right asset while a search result continues displaying a ghost from an older WordPress installation.

That changes the definition of done. The engineering task ends when the correct icon is declared, built, deployed and returned from the public endpoint. The observation phase ends later, when the systems around the site have forgotten the old identity too.