{jb_clear}{/jb_clear} {jb_line}{/jb_line} Can you tell us a little bit about Dry Icons? Who are you? What do you do?

is a Rabotilnica project in which we have two main services:

1. Free Icon Sets

2. Free Graphics.

These services are provided by our team of enthusiastic graphic and web designers and programmers. We develop/design Free Icon Sets twice a month, and every single day we design one vector Graphic and we make these works available for all, or we give them away for FREE. The purpose of this service is to provide only high-quality, free icons and free icon sets, as well as free vector graphics to the general public, with a specific target to designers, software and web developers.

Our team is comprised of two programmers and two designers, best friends, too, with more than 6 years of experience in our fields of interests. We are: Meri, Vane, Vanco and Krum and we are from Macedonia.

{jb_line}{/jb_line} Where do you find design inspiration from? What sort of trends do you like/follow/notice?

For us, it's very easy to get inspired, so we often get an idea from everyday objects (the main idea behind our Stickers icon set was taken from everyday object), or nature (Blossom icon set), or the way we fell at the moment. We also get inspired by various events (New Year, Christmas, European Football Championship...), or a short comment on our website, suggesting what the user needs. Regarding trends, we feel that it's very important to keep things simple and basic, so they could serve their initial purpose: to fit in one's project as it would seem like that was the way it should naturally be. That's the only trend we follow.

{jb_line}{/jb_line} You have some very generous licenses for your work in particular some really very reasonable commercial and extended licenses - seems to be unique in terms of stock icons and icon galleries. Is it a good business model?

Yes, that's the main idea behind our Commercial and Extended Licenses, to be reasonable, so every developer/programmer/designer could afford getting one. Even our Custom Icons service is very affordable, we have had clients like Adobe, or Vulto, but we keep our pricing very down to earth and reasonable. The idea with the Licensing somehow came naturally; we started the DryIcons project with a Creative Commons Attribution Licensing, which allowed pretty much everything, as long as you linked back to our website. In a while people started asking for a different kind of licensing because they couldn't link to DryIcons, so we came up with the Commercial License, and in a while with the Extended License, following the same pattern.

The DryIcons project is a great playground for us, we do a lot of experimenting, a lot of pulse feeling, but we learned that sometimes users can be the best guides. All you need to do is to follow.

{jb_line}{/jb_line} Million dollar question: What is the future of web design? Are we post web 2.0?

The term Web 2.0 became very popular few years ago in order to differentiate the obvious new Web concepts that appeared in the early 2000's compared to what the Web was before that. Although there is a great deal of disagreements about the necessity of the term itself and the definition of its meaning as well, it is widely accepted as the next generation of the Web, or simply representation of the modern trends in web design. It's not only about presenting the information anymore, but how you present it. Web 2.0 involves creativity in design and user interaction, connection and collaboration.

An interesting fact is that we are still using, although greatly improved, most of the technologies that were available almost since the beginning of WWW: HTML, JavaScript, Server-Side technologies, and even Flash Player which is the most used application today for presenting web animations and media (Macromedia's Flash 1 appeared in 1996). However, compared to the slow dial-up, today's world-wide average of more than 1Mpbs bandwidth allows usage of mostly same (but again improved) technologies for development and access of Rich Internet Applications.

When it comes to the future of the Web -- the successor of Web 2.0, we find it the most acceptable Nova Spivack's research definition of Web 3.0. He defines Web 3.0 as "the third decade of the Web (2010–2020) during which several major complementary technology trends will reach new levels of maturity" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0]. According to this definition one (and perhaps the most) possible path of evolution of the Web is towards an intelligent, database distributed ("World Wide Database") and highly open (in terms of both, identity and technologies) World Wide Web.

The evolving technologies and concepts in Spivack's research definition, among the others include: open identity, distributed databases, intelligence, open technologies, transformation of the Web, ubiquitous connectivity and network computing. What is also very interesting is: How is the design going to evolve in the next Web generation? And again, what are already starting to wrap off are the obvious attempts to transform the current 2D visual viewports of the web applications into 3D presentations. We find support for the latter in the analogy between the Web and the computer games when it comes to the design, at least on a subjective basis. They both started as a poor graphic presentations (funny-looking 2D graphic objects in early computer games and simple text presentation of the information in the 1990s web pages). Today, however, computer games are realistic virtual 3D worlds. We find it pretty logical for the Web design to evolve in that direction too.

Having said that, we've probably answered the other question: Are we post Web 2.0? We'd say we are ahead (or at least moving ahead) from the Web 2.0 towards Web 3.0, and that definitely qualifies as post Web 2.0.

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