You might notice your web browser has a small picture next to the page title on the browser tab. This is a pretty old-school thing from the early days of the web called a ‘favicon’. They are a nice to have and most sites will have one. In the super-early days of the web these had their own designated file format (.ico) and could be a maximum of 16 pixels x 16 pixels in size. You had to have some creativity and imagination to make that work! There were some dedicated tools you could use to make them by painting in the pixels one at a time. You can see a slight blow-up of the original favicon on the About Us page.
I dutifully did that for the early days of Niade but modern browsing tools give you more latitude in terms of how many pixels you can have and as modern displays kicked up the pixel density on the screen, e.g. Apple retina displays, the old 16 x 16 px favicon, although it had a certain “old-school” charm to it, really needed some updating.
Seems a job for one of the fancy new AIs. I do like the old-school styling so wanted to retain that broad concept – a 5 banded barb inspired theme. I thought this would be a pretty trivial upscale but turns out not to be the case. After having not much luck with either Claude or Gemini I trotted out ChatGPT (ordinarily not my go-to LLM) and whoa-hey-presto! It did a nice job.
16 x 16 px favicon
upscaled 512 x 512 px favicon
It did still take quite a few iterations to get across the finish line, but I’m well-pleased with the final result.