There are some files that belong in your root destination directory that you won't want to process or revision in production. Things like favicons, app icons, etc., should go in src/static, and will get copied over to public as a last step (after revisioning in production). Nothing should ever go directly in public, since it gets completely trashed and re-built when running the default or production tasks.
gulpfile.js/tasks/static
Files are copied from this folder to the root.dest folder specified in gulpfile.js/config.json.