Make a letter icon set in Archivo and download it as SVG, PNG or a complete favicon package — the letters are vectorized, so nobody needs the font installed to see your mark.
A grotesque drawn for highlights and headlines, with sturdy stems and a slightly compressed width.
The letter A set in Archivo at weight 700, vectorized with opentype.js. Drag it to reposition, then download.
ABCDEFGHIJKLM
NOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ &
A grotesque drawn for highlights and headlines, with sturdy stems and a slightly compressed width. That makes it a natural fit for dense, confident single-letter marks.
Neutral and humanist sans-serifs behave well in an icon because they were drawn for screens, with open apertures and generous counters that survive rasterisation. They are the safe choice, and safety is exactly the point when the mark has to sit next to native OS chrome without looking out of place. The risk is that a neutral face contributes nothing memorable: two products using the same letter in the same UI sans are visually interchangeable. Lean on colour, container shape and the letter itself — a K, R or Q gives you far more to work with than an H or an O.
At heavy weights the counters close fast; check the e and a specifically.
A favicon is rendered at 16 × 16 pixels. That is roughly the area of a single character of this paragraph, and it is where most typographic decisions stop mattering and start breaking. The reliable test is not to zoom out of a large preview — browsers resample that far more kindly than a real favicon pipeline does — but to export the actual favicon.ico and look at it in a browser tab.
The preview above is not text with a CSS font-family applied to it. The editor loads the Archivo TTF from Google Fonts, parses it with opentype.js, and converts the glyph into an SVG <path> at weight 700. Archivo covers a usable weight range, so you can dial the mark heavier for small sizes and lighter for large ones without changing the letterform. Because the export contains outlines rather than text, the mark renders identically for every visitor whether or not they have the font, and it stays crisp at any size.
Open the free editor with Archivo and 900+ other Google Fonts. Change the weight, spacing, colours and corner radius, then export SVG, PNG, ICO or a complete web icon package.
Open the Archivo icon editorOther faces in and around the grotesque sans category.