You have one clean PNG of the mark. Marketing wants it in the tab. The PWA manifest wants 192 and 512 . Apple wants apple-touch-icon . Someone pastes a Notion embed and suddenly you need 32×32 that still looks like the brand at a glance.

I used to open a desktop icon packer (or worse — ask design for "the full favicon set") every time a side project needed a tab icon. That path is fine for a brand refresh. It's painful for a Friday afternoon deploy where the logo already exists as a single PNG.

What "a favicon set" actually means now

It's rarely one favicon.ico anymore. A boring but complete set usually includes:

16 / 32 — browser tab + bookmarks (often still ICO or PNG)

180 — apple-touch-icon (iOS home screen / Safari)

192 / 512 — PWA icons in the web manifest

Optional 48 / 96 — Android chrome / shortcut leftovers some templates still expect

You don't need twelve sizes.…