I'd pay $5 a pop for a custom favicon - I give you an image, you pixelart it. Not the crappy png-to-ico converters, but an actual person that knows what they are doing. Maybe even $9 if you let me pick from 3 options.
My current approach is to scale down a png in Pixelmator and hope there aren't that many jaggies. In the end, they usually look like crap and not as sharp as the ones in this post. I would follow this tutorial, but there is a Miracle Function that involves knowing how to do shadows based on a light source - which I don't know how to do.
> knowing how to do shadows based on a light source
Admittedly not everybody has the same level of visuospatial ability, but generally it is a matter of thinking of the angle at which light strikes the surface.
For example, virtual every GUI widget I've ever seen is drawn as if the light is coming from the top-left corner, so surfaces facing top-left are the brightest, while surfaces facing bottom-right are the darkest.
I wonder how fast a good designer could bang out a favicon (given a source image)? My gut estimate is 30-60 minutes at a bare minimum. If so, they'd probably want to charge more than a few dollars. But that could be a fun side project for a designer. Set up a site and let people queue up requests, then when you get some time, just open up your backlog of favicon requests and churn them out for 10 bucks a pop.
I think it depends how many sites you own, if you only own one then you'll probably be prepared to part with a lot more than someone who manages a load of different sites. Anyone tackling this market should probably set up 2 sites offering the same service branded and priced accordingly.
Sure, my use-case is that I have a few toy side-project apps. Serious enough that I'll drop $15 for a .com domain and could part with $5 for a nice favicon, but not enough that I really care enough to spend $50 (since they don't make revenue).
It's a funny thought experiment. Some people want to only spend a few bucks. But whats the price not for the pixeling, but the time it took to learn color theory, illustration, composition, what makes a bad icon, etc.?
My current approach is to scale down a png in Pixelmator and hope there aren't that many jaggies. In the end, they usually look like crap and not as sharp as the ones in this post. I would follow this tutorial, but there is a Miracle Function that involves knowing how to do shadows based on a light source - which I don't know how to do.