Designing a favicon

Of all the details I needed to consider when creating a website, I was surprised at how hard it was to decide on a favicon. That's the little picture next to the website name on the browser tab. Squarespace's default picture is a cube -- not very original. 

What makes a good favicon? In my opinion:
- relevance: it needs to represents me, so something science-related
- design: should be aesthetically pleasing
- simplicity: after all, we only have 16x16 pixels to work with

Discarded designs:

HBr MD.png

HBr approaching a silicon surface
Problem: doesn't scale well, not very interesting, doesn't say much about me other than that I've modeled this system.

Si100.png

Atomic resolution image of silicon
Problem: while this is cool to me and a small community of scanning tunneling microscopists, it does not scale well and is neither interesting nor pretty. 

Chosen design:

tip_large_shadow.png

Sharp probe for scanning tunneling microscopy
One key element of STM is the ability to image at the atomic resolution.

STM works by sweeping a probe over a minuscule region of our sample and recording the current at each point.

That current represents the interaction between, ideally, one atom at the tip of our probe with one atom at the surface of our sample. 

There are many techniques to make these probes. I use sodium hydroxide to etch tungsten wires, hence the classic shape shown in my drawing. 

Si Yue Guo