Graphic artist Jan-Michael Cart is on fire lately with his iOS 5 concept videos. After dreaming of better speech recognition, fast app switching, and Lion-style dashboard, Jan-Michael is now introducing us to a new concept: dynamic icons.
Basically, instead of displaying a push notification alert in your face, dynamic icons can transform into icons that become the notification. Doesn’t make much sense? Then watch this video and read Cart explaining his vision of dynamic icons…
Users have the option of turning on these “dynamic icons” by going to the Settings. Icons are granted the ability to change their appearance given a variety of push notifications. In turn, once the notification badge is pushed, a new icon file is displayed. These icons can have text (albeit small, but legible text due to the Retina Display), images, a mixture of the two, or something constantly changing (but based on an internal source, not using cellular data — a la Clock app that displays time).
I think this concept is brilliant but I wonder how practical it is. What do you think?