How to Create Safari Pinned Tab Icons

Craig Hockenberry:

The recent release of Safari 9.0 brought a great new feature: pinned tabs. These tabs are locked to the lefthand side of your tab bar and stay in place, even when you open a new window or relaunch the browser.

The default behavior is to display the first letter of the site’s name on a color from the site’s theme. If you work on a site with a strong branding element, you’ll want to customize the icon on the pinned tab. Anthony Piraino and I have been working on one for the Iconfactory and would like to share some of the things we learned.

Personally, I went with John Siracusa’s approach and it worked fine. I had to use Affinity Designer though, Illustrator did not output a compatible file for some reason. I really should get around to making one for this site…