Designing for devices that don’t exist yet

We build every hero interaction to degrade through four tiers: full real-time 3D, a lighter shader pass, a static parallax fallback, and a plain image. Not because today’s visitor needs all four — because eighteen months from now, some visitor’s hardware will sit in a tier we haven’t tested against yet, and the site should still make sense to them.

Designing for the hardware you can’t predict is the actual job. Designing for the demo laptop in the pitch meeting is not.