Simon O’Shea

Simon O’Shea

Designer at Pandora Joined about 10 years ago

  • 1 story
  • 68 comments
  • 68 upvotes
  • Posted to The Perfect Paragraph: A Web Typography Learning Game, Jun 13, 2017

    Beautifully made site! Love it, and I think it instills some best practice methods. But I think it’s hard to justify (heh) a one-size-fits-all solution for typography. While font size, leading, tracking, and line width should all be considered, the beauty of graphic design is that you can manipulate these all independently. Obviously if your use case requires strict legibility for a particular audience or medium, then you should adjust accordingly. And while I believe the old adage that “typography is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters”, the impact of great typography often comes from pushing the boundaries of scale and balance. To quote David Carson, “Don’t confuse legibility with communication”. In short, there’s no perfect paragraph.

    4 points
  • Posted to How does the new US government affect our field of design? , in reply to Raffaello Sanzio , Nov 23, 2016

    Haha! This is true for the most part. However for designers outside the United States planning to work here, the process for acquiring a work visa, in particular the H1-B program, could potentially be harder than it currently is. For employers and large organizations, hiring designers from abroad may also be tougher, given Trump's comments on international employment.

    2 points
  • Posted to the Orchard – Apple, Oct 06, 2016

    Is this for a future parent company like Alphabet is to Google or did we just find out what Cicada 3301 means?

    2 points
  • Posted to Figma's Vector Networks in Gravit, Jul 15, 2016

    That felt very German.

    1 point
  • Posted to Ask DN: Where do I find great UI resources for Windows 10 (Mobile+Desktop)?, Dec 07, 2015

    Try the design section of their dev center. It’s not the ultimate resource, and a lot is carried over from their Windows 8 templates, but it’s a start and very useful for wireframing and prototyping.

    1 point
  • Posted to iPad Pro resolution vs every other Apple display, in reply to Elliott Regan , Sep 13, 2015

    Exactly! For example, the Surface Pro has a ratio of 3:2. Then when it comes to their phones, you might have a Lumia phone that has a 5-inch display and another than has a 6-inch display which are both 1080×1920px but have different scaling factors. Apple and Android devices are similar in their inconsistencies. Google's device metrics page illustrates this well. I think ultimately you either test thoroughly on multiple devices or just give up, set everything on fire and go live on a desert island.

    1 point
  • Posted to Adrian Frutiger, 1928 — September 12, 2015. RIP, Sep 12, 2015

    “In general I am pleased if new typefaces resemble Frutiger. If other designers copy my typeface it must be good.”

    …from Eye Magazine’s 1999 feature on Adrian Frutiger.

    It’s crazy to think the influence he’s had on modern type design and graphic design in general. Univers was a groundbreaking design, more human than its counterpart Helvetica, more modern than Akzidenz. Frutiger marks signage everywhere; at almost every airport. It’s the muse of typefaces like Myriad and TheSans, and the foundation of bastardizations — I mean, homages — like Segoe. And Avenir was an instant classic adopted by the digital world.

    8 points
  • Posted to Ask DN: How do you provide devs with design direction for responsive design ?, in reply to Wes Oudshoorn , Jul 29, 2015

    Absolutely… thinking in terms of components is essential. Also, tools like Edge Reflow are really handy for getting a grid structure with breakpoints and often quicker for a designer than writing CSS.

    1 point
  • Posted to New Lenovo Logo, in reply to Joel Califa , Jun 05, 2015

    Yeah, I was kinda trolling.

    0 points
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