New favicon and inner truth

My first favicon is now out of favour. The new, more thoughtful, icon has taken it’s place in the root of my home directory. The old quarter donut icon has been survived by the cache of an accidental visitor here and over there.

In coming up with the new design it seemed fitting for the Ollicle to draw some inspiration from the Oracle: “The wind blows over the lake and stirs the surface of the water. Thus visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves.”

My new icon is based on the I Ching hexagram described above – Fu Chung or Inner Truth. Which also just happens to make the shape of an “O”. Any graphic designer who has attempted to write a meaningful rationale for an abstract design, ought to find the I Ching a remarkable example of this kind of analytical thinking – taken to it’s ultimate extreme.

Thinking about favicons lately it struck me that they are not as web friendly as they could be. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have the option of including these little pixel jewels in the flow of our web pages.

For example a link to this page from another site could look like this: Favicons and inner truth.

Here I have made a gif version of the icon for easy browser display. If only more browsers were as clever as Safari, which renders favicons (and even Photoshop files!) in the browser pane. Then I could have linked to the icon directly.

What if the link to this icon could be retrieved automatically? I imagine this would look great for the list of links seen in a column on many blogs. Each link with it’s own personal glyph. In the flow of text these little logos could be useful visual cues that a link is directed to a site outside the current domain.

I suspect if this idea was to ever find legs it make many blogs look like pizza!