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Andy Pickle
Andy Pickle

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at andypickle.dev

Add an Emoji Favicon to your site!

Hey there, this is my first post on dev.to, so I thought I'd share a short little trick I learned that makes websites look better!

For starters, if you don't know what a favicon is, don't fret! I didn't until recently. Its the small thumbnail on your tab. If you use Google Chrome, it looks like this:

Favicons!

I've been working on a project1 for CS50 for web-programming class. The assignment: build a book review website, using Flask and PostgreSQL. While I was working on it, I got bit miffed that my site wasn't looking very professional. I was using Bootstrap, for the ease of formatting, but that wasn't looking great, just a tad better than the default. I decided adding a favicon would help a bit, but I didn't want to mess with making a logo or finding a picture and scaling it, so I thought. Maybe an emoji would work? It did, fantastically!

I decided it would be painless to find the emoji I wanted and then just add it to my

of my template.html. Here's how the code ended up looking:

Code Screenshot

This adds a great touch, and if a user is like me and has 15 tabs open at all times, the favicon, would help them find the correct page.

Here's how I did it:

  1. Head to https://emojipedia.org/
  2. Find your emoji.
  3. Right-Click on the emoji style you prefer (I'm an Apple person)
  4. Copy the link and insert into your <head> tag like so: <link rel="icon" href="https://emojipedia-us.s3.dualstack.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/thumbs/240/apple/155/books_1f4da.png">

And you're done! I was using flask for this project, so I put this in the layout page and it dynamically puts in on any template that has the

{% extends "layout.html" %}

at the top of the .html doc.

Here's how it looks!

Look at the icon in the tab!

As you can see, I'm still testing on a localhost, haven't quite finished the project yet, but it'll be on my profile site, and its own repo as well.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this, let me know. If there's a way it could be better, let me know! Feel free to follow me on Twitter or Github!

Top comments (4)

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shalvah profile image
Shalvah

Just coming here to say I found this helpful. Thanks! You can also use favicon.io to generate an emoji favicon, but you'll have to host it yourself.

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pickleat profile image
Andy Pickle

Thanks! I didn’t know about that site, I’ll check it out.

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yvesgurcan profile image
Yves Gurcan

Thanks for the tip! I was looking for a way to get a favicon out of an emoji :)

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pickleat profile image
Andy Pickle

You're so welcome!