Mashed browsers and the IE-lephant — A Web Directions adventure

A few weeks ago I gave a talk at Web Directions Summit 2019 in Sydney. The talk was about the ECMA-402 Internationalisation APIs built in to browsers, because I don’t think enough people know about them. A fully written version of the talk is available on this site in the unsurprisingly-named Talks section: Intl we meet again.

There was a helluva lot of stress and preparation involved in trying to make a rather dry topic sound interesting for 20 minutes. In the end, the results were worth it, but I was reminded why it had been several years since I’d previously given a conference talk. It will likely be several years before I do another one entirely from scratch.

I got some good feedback about the talk, but there were two parts I was particularly pleased with. Even if the presentation had tanked, I’d still have been satisfied with the completion of two slides. Mainly because they gave me the excuse to muck around in design tools and pretend I’m a real designer.

These items were the mashed-up browser logos, and the “IE-lephant in the room”. I had enough people talk to me about the images after the talk that I’ve decided to pop them online for all to see. Both images are linked from this post in SVG form, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. That means you’re free to copy them, modify them, do whatever… but with an attribution credit too.

Some-in-one browser logo

Mashed up and combined logos of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.

The idea of smooshing many web browser vendor logos into a single image was one I had years ago. This talk was finally the excuse I’d been looking for to actually do something about it. I’m perhaps far more pleased with the result than I should be.

I’ll refrain from calling it an all-in-one logo, as there are many more browsers available than just Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. Important note: This isn’t intended to favour any one browser over the others. My intent was for this image to equally (but light-heartedly) offend the designers of each of the featured logos. 😉

It would also be hypocritical of me to request attribution without also giving some in return. So for completeness, here are the links to the original vector images that went into this (before a lot of cleaning, nudging, and mangling of the files in Illustrator):

Of course, as soon as I’d finished the mashup image and put it my presentation, 2 of the 4 logos became outdated. Firefox has just got an updated and simplified logo, while Edge’s logo has had a complete revamp for its move to a Chromium base. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to make a Version 2 at some point.

IE-lephant

Internet Explorer logo merged onto the body of an elephant.

In contrast to the well-planned logo mashup, this image was pretty much a spur-of-the-moment joke. Its only purpose was to be a punchline — “I’ve only talked about support for modern browsers; but what about the elephant in the room?”

I’m not really sure it has any reusable purpose beyond that joke, but I’m still rather pleased with the result, so I’m sharing it anyway.

The two source images that went into this are:

Enjoy!