Remember the Milk Favicon Redesigned

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rtm_128x128According to userscripts.org, over a hundred Greasemonkey users have been unhappy enough with Google’s favicon to replace it with my redesign. This motivated me to turn my eye to another troubling icon, that of Remember the Milk.

Remember the Milk is my task manager of choice. While there are many worthy competitors, RTM has the right combination of rapid task generation and streamlined organization to establish a permanent spot in my browser and iPhone.

While it would be easy to mock their bovine mascot, I’ve actually grown quite fond of it. While certainly not the most polished solution in the world, it exudes a certain friendliness and lack-of-intimidation. The organic line ultimately compliments the simple, Google-esque interface.

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Unfortunately, the favicon has not grown on me as nicely. It appears they took a square image of the mascot without transparency, shrunk it down to 16 pixels and called it good. While not as offensive as the Google favicon redesign, the lack of polish belies what a breeze the app is to use.

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I redesigned the 16-pixel version from scratch to insure it scaled to that size gracefully, with a transparent background to respect the color of the user’s theme. More clarity in the pixels means a more accurate emotional representation of the original image.

Install RTM Favicon Redesigned 1.3

Prism or Fluid users may be interested in downloading the icon (with the larger RTM logo included up to 128 square pixels) in Windows, Mac and PNG formats.

Updated (2/17/2009): Script and icon files updated with improved anti-aliasing.

Updated (5/9/2009): I noticed that Prism adds aliasing to the app icon when you choose an ICO file. I’ve included a PNG version as an alternative, which seems to solve the problem.

Updated (5/30/2010): Added support for Google Chrome. Thanks to superrush4x for figuring that out!

Updated (7/9/2010): Fixed a bug in Google Chrome using a code snippet from Peter’s favicon alert scripts.

2 Comments

Nice work! I’ve always liked how the the need to for clarity in a small space leads to abstraction and pixel art in favicons.

That’s one of the reasons I have so much fun working at 16 pixels. Grabbing the pencil tool and building the image up is a great challenge that brings to mind bygone days of playing in Kid Pix. I imagine it’s similar to Brian Eno composing the Windows 95 startup sound.