For centuries,
visual designer's role has involved creating families of related designs.
If you're creating book covers, you may have different languages,
where your design needs to accommodate the title from different languages.
If you're an automobile designer,
you'll have a whole family of cars which need to express the same vocabulary,
from the smallest one all the way up to the largest one.
In recent years this has gotten even more complicated.
Part of what's exciting, but also challenging on visual design for
computers is that we have this increasing diversity of devices.
This means different size displays, different input modalities,
different usage scenarios, all sorts of stuff.
So the user interface that works on a watch might be different than the one that
works on a tablet, or a phone, or a wall, or a pull out display, or
anything that might be coming along.
Until recently, I would say that many people did web design,
for example, focusing on something that was a laptop-ish
size screen first, maybe 1024 x 768.
But now there are so many different sizes.
You don't even need to go too far afield.
Let's just look, for example,
at the range of Apple touch screen devices sold in the past few years.
You go from a 3.5 inch diagonal screen all the way up to a 13 inch diagonal screen.
That is a four fold increase in physical real estate.
That's almost a ten fold increase in the total number of square inches of real
estate that's available.
And that compounds with the fact that you've got higher resolution screens and
all a lot other stuff going on at the same time.