Doing a quick portfolio refresh and this should tell you about the madness of developing for Web in 2016. Once upon a time, you created a fav.ico file – the little browser icon – and that was it. Create the file, code it to create the .ico file format, and upload to your site. Now you need to create for a digital ecosystem garden of sizes, and responsiveness doesn’t address that much either. While automation has helped by creating tools to help manage this chaos, this will only get worse as the Internet of Things and multiple touch points continue to be created, and the need to evolve the designs and maintain them is extensive.
Think about it – that’s the code and design assets for a relatively minor front end touch point – an icon. WordPress makes this easy to update, and you can also go the old school route of updating the code manually and doing the image slicing and tools like FavIcon Generator. As we create kiosks in our Smart Cities, mobile devices and smart everything (homes, work, bodies, robots), what are the assets to create? What are the code and designs we’ll need to make, and what are the tools we’ll need to make them? Will we have a FavIcon generator for the UIs in everything we experience, and how will we work to manage the front end user experience and the maintenance of that experience? I have faith in developers to create the generator tools – I have less faith in our ability to constantly manage the experience itself. At one point working with developers, they had to wrestle with multiple JavaScript libraries – Angular versus Backbone versus Ember, plus the coding environment to manage all of that. As a designer, from the outside I know enough to see they can make it work, but it starts to feel complicated and less like a front end experience, and more like an air traffic controller for an airplane that’s being built, landing and taking off at an ever increasing rate.
It’s as it should be – mediums evolve, and our response to how to manage them needs to evolve. But when you let a thousand flowers bloom, don’t forget you need to tend to the garden, but we don’t think about gardening as necessary. I will always love the Web as this evolving medium that changes as we react to it, but I wonder if the folks in print have less stress overall, and how best to manage to the gardens we create as our devices, channels and experiences become more complicated. Design can work to simplify the front end human experience, but one wonders how much of the behind the curtain, back end experience we and simplify.
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