Icons of the Web is a cool little app that visualizes the web’s top sites via their favicons. The larger the favicon, the more popular the site.

I was delighted to find my Brizzly icon hiding only a little ways into the pixel forest. It’s above and to the right of the MSN butterfly, nestled between SFR and the SparkFun icon. Neat!

Déjà vu! Brizzly and Forrst now have something in common: both have adopted my favicon redesigns.

The Forrst icon was particularly rewarding since I designed it using the app itself as a tool for soliciting and responding to feedback. You can read about the design process in last week’s post on the subject.

Forrst is an awesome new platform for designers and developers to share bits of what they’re working on (my buddy Pasquale created the logo and introductory graphic).

The site and accompanying illustrations are gorgeous, but I wasn’t a fan of the favicon. These alternatives were designed with feedback from the Forrst community here, here and here.

Update (July 19, 2010): Forrst now uses my redesigned icon!

The current former favicon, the logo resized on a white square:

My redesign, taking cues from the web site header:

A wooden alternative (my personal favorite):

I whipped up a userscript for those who’d like to use my alternatives, optimized for Chrome and Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension.

Firefox users can choose between the green and wooden versions by going to Tools, Greasemonkey, UserScript Commands. Forrst has adopted my green favicon as its own, so the script has been updated to apply the wooden version only.

Install Forrst Favicon Redesigned 1.1

Now that the awesome Brizzly web app has integrated my revision of their 16-pixel icon, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a responsibility to its continued iconographic success.

Sometime last week, the folks at Thing Labs debuted a nifty new navigation paradigm with the addition of service-specific tabs. My pal Calvin Ross Carl hepped me to their inclusion, and we both noticed two oddities in their implementation.

The Twitter and Facebook icons are being sized down to fit the height of the tab, resulting in some degradation of quality as the browser struggles to choose the right pixels to maintain or omit. Secondly, if Helvetica Neue is not installed, a CSS bug may cause a serif font family to display instead of a sans-serif.

Since my Ice Cream Social Icon Pack seemed visually harmonious with the revised bear, I decided to remedy both of these problems via a quick user script. The result is much more consistent with the rest of the Brizzly header:

Firefox users must install the Greasemonkey extension to use the script, Chrome users can install it like any other extension. It has been tested in Firefox 3.6, Chrome 5 and Opera 10.5 on a Windows 7 PC.

Install Better Brizzly Social Icons 1.1

1.1 Update: Fixed to work with the Picnic update, though no Picnic icon has been created… yet!

Brizzly is my favorite web-based Twitter application. Regular readers of this blog may remember my redesign of the service’s favicon for Peter Wooley’s Brizzly Favicon Alerts script for Greasemonkey.

Shortly after the script’s debut, I was contacted by the folks at Thing Labs (they make Brizzly) to talk about integrating my icon into the app.

A few months later, a new Brizzly interface debuted. Hidden in plain sight among the numerous UI and feature improvements, my 16 square pixels of glory perched unassumingly at the top of the page.

This is why I love the Internet. If you release a compelling product, you’ll inspire users to contribute ideas, feedback, or even design assets. Keep your ear to the ground, and you’ll swiftly reap the rewards.