How small can a logo be?

Sixteen dots by sixteen, on a ground you don’t choose: that is a logo in a browser’s tab. Of the world’s most-visited sites, the dark tab takes black and Chrome’s light tab takes white. Every icon that keeps most of itself in both is in colour.

Ebbi · 22 October 2026

A favicon is your logo, made small. Export it at 16, 32 and 48 pixels, give Google a bigger one, and it looks like you everywhere. Ask how small a logo can be, and that is the answer you get.

So I looked where it lands: in the tab, dot by dot, the way the browser draws it.

Sixteen dots.

A browser’s tab gives a site’s icon a square 16 pixels wide. On an ordinary screen that is 16 dots by 16: 256, for your whole logo. On a sharp screen, the same square holds 32 by 32.

Chrome shows those two as they are drawn, dot for dot. Between them it does not. Windows sets a 15-inch Full HD laptop to 125 per cent, and a 13-inch one of 1,920 by 1,200 pixels to 150, and there the square is 20 or 24 dots wide: Chrome resizes another drawing to fit, and every edge goes soft. ESPN and Yahoo Japan each hand it a drawing made for 24 dots. It shows neither.

Two grounds.

The tab has colours of its own, and you don’t choose them. In Chrome’s light theme the tabs behind the one you are on sit on a pale blue; in its dark theme, on a near-black. Your icon is drawn on whichever the reader has picked.

The web’s own rules for accessibility ask any part of a graphic you need to see to stand off its ground three times over in brightness. Black on Chrome’s near-black manages 1.3. So does white on its pale blue.

Brightness is not all the eye sees: a red on the near-black stands out by its colour where its brightness falls short. So I counted each dot by how different its colour looks from the tab’s, the colour scientists’ own measure, and kept the brightness rule beside it.

The forty-two.

I took the world’s fifty most-visited websites, as Similarweb ranks them for September 2026, and left out the five a page of mine never shows: four adult sites and one for betting. On 22 October 2026 I opened the rest in Chromium, the open-source heart of Chrome, eight tabs to a window, in its light theme and its dark one, and read each icon dot by dot as it sat in a tab behind the one in front.

Canva answered my machine with a robot check in the dark. Yandex opened onto Dzen and Live.com onto Microsoft, so each counts once. That leaves 42.

Every icon, in both tabs.

The middle icon covers about three quarters of its square, in either tab. Most stay themselves: 33 of the 42 keep most of themselves in both tabs. Every one of those 33 is in colour.

The dark tab takes black. Four of the 42 keep less than half of themselves there, and all four are black. ChatGPT’s knot disappears completely. X, TikTok and Dzen each set a light mark on a black square: the square goes, and the mark is left on its own.

The light tab takes white. Chrome’s is not white but pale blue, and a white ground melts into it. Four keep less than half there: Google, Wikipedia, Baidu and Apple, each a mark on white. The white goes; the mark is left.

One site draws a second icon for the dark. GitHub’s black cat turns white.

Google’s round.

Your icon has one more small seat: Google’s results. There it sits in a round about 26 pixels across on a laptop, drawn edge to edge and cut round. Google asks for a square at least 8 pixels wide, and better more than 48, in a format it reads: ICO, PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP, PPM or TIFF, never SVG. And it keeps its own copy, redrawn only when it next reads your home page: in days or weeks, it says.

For your logo.

So how small can a logo be? Sixteen dots, on a ground you don’t choose. Use the square: the middle icon here covers three quarters of it. Give the mark a colour that stands off a near-black and a pale blue at once; in this count, every icon that held in both was in colour. A black mark needs something light of its own around it, or a second drawing for the dark, as GitHub has; a mark on white has to carry the icon alone in a light tab. And draw the 16 and the 32 dot by dot: they are the only two Chrome shows as drawn.

In a dark tab, black disappears. In Chrome’s light tab, white does.

Seen while makingMy own eye