What is an IP Icon?
The IP Icon uniquely renders every IP address into a compact image that shows patterns useful to humans.

IP addresses are numbers grouped into bytes, or 8 bit numbers from 0 to 255. The IP Icon breaks that further into 4 bit nibbles that can have a value from 0 to 15. The icon is generated by taking the bytes from left to right in the address and rendering them from left to right in the image as 2 nibbles. The high order nibble of each byte is rendered first with a width of 2 pixels and a height of 1 plus the value. The second nibble follows with a width of 1 and the height of 1 plus the value. Then an empty vertical pixel is skipped before rendering the next byte. Each byte follows in order. Thus, the height of the image is always 16 pixels and the width of the image is 4 times the number of bytes or 16 pixels for IPv4 addresses and 64 pixels for IPv6 addresses.

The IP Icon quickly shows pattern in addresses, with the most significant part of each byte shown more prominantly. Additionally, any change in value between addresses is shown in a visually distinct format.

Some examples:

IPv4: 192.255.0.127

IPv6: 2001:4860:800f::69

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