About Iconvanta

What it is for

Iconvanta is meant to be the place you go when a site needs its icons: the small picture in a browser tab, the one on a phone's home screen, and the larger ones an installed web app asks for. You will start from text, an emoji or an image, and download the files one by one or in a single ZIP. It will not ask you to register, and it will not ask you to upload anything, because the tools are designed to run on your device.

What exists today

The site, its pages and its privacy policy exist. No generator is available yet. Nothing on Iconvanta makes an icon, converts an image or builds a ZIP at the moment, and the site does not pretend otherwise. The home page does explain what a complete icon set contains, because that is useful whichever tool you use. When a tool is ready it will get its own page and be added to the home page.

What is planned

• Favicon from an image. Start from a PNG, JPG or SVG, crop and position it, choose a background color or keep it transparent, and see it at the sizes it will be shown at.
• Favicon from text or an emoji. One or two characters or an emoji, with a choice of font, weight, colors, alignment and size.
• The complete package. The files a site needs, built in your browser: favicon.ico, the 16 and 32 pixel PNGs, the Apple touch icon, the two Android Chrome icons, a web app manifest, an HTML snippet and, where it fits, an SVG. Each file on its own, or all of them in one ZIP.
• Previews. How the icon looks in a browser tab, on a desktop, on a phone's home screen and as a simple app icon.
• Converters and checkers. PNG to ICO, an image to favicon converter, a favicon preview tester, an icon dimension checker and an HTML favicon code generator.

The order is not fixed, and you can say what you need first through the contact page.

How the tools will be built

An image will be opened by the browser, drawn on a canvas at each size and encoded as a PNG, on your own device. The ICO file and the ZIP will be written in the page from those PNGs. A file will be offered only when the browser can really produce it, a format the browser cannot read will be refused with a message that says why, and every generated file will be checked before it is offered: its type, its dimensions and, for the manifest and the HTML snippet, that they are valid.

Working in the browser has limits worth knowing. A very large image uses your device's memory, browsers differ in which image formats they can open, and an icon made from a detailed picture is hard to read at 16 pixels. The tools will say so instead of hiding it.

How it is funded

Iconvanta is free to use and may be supported by advertising. Advertisements will be labelled and kept away from uploads, previews and download controls, and never placed where they could be mistaken for a control. The privacy policy describes what advertising partners may collect when ads are shown.