Patric King

Hi, designers. As some of you may know, today's my last day with Print Magazine as a regular contributor. It would appear I’ve been writing Obsessions since the Chicago HOW Design Conference. Not last year’s HOW Conference, the one in 2005. At that point, Obsessions was a sort of catchall column, dedicated to curiosities of [...]

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If your Halloween hair is not close enough to the Lord, may I suggest buying a custom confection from Fifi Mahony's in New Orleans? They outfit many a professional drag queen, burlesque dancer, and stripper, so you know that your hair will amaze and last. They constantly post new work to Facebook, so like 'em. [...]

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Here’s a fascinating article from Discover Magazine circa 1987 which essentially posits that the idea of human progress due to civilization is nonsense. That’s shocking enough in and of itself, but current world events support some of what he’s saying. The author cites several facts based around agriculture showing that from the pre-agricultural period to [...]

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Based upon what we know about Opera’s new paged media and Adobe’s earlier CSS regions specifications, the future looks pretty bright for publishing to move into an HTML5 standard. Amazon’s pushing things one step further with its recent unveiling of their Silk browser and an announcement that they’re supporting HTML5 as the underlying technology for [...]

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From last Friday’s entry about Dekalb Genetics, my friend Jesse sent a story from his childhood along. I thought it was a poignant look at how companies and their symbols get into our minds and hearts. Herewith: Don’t remember if I ever showed you my prized specimen. It’s on a sort of fiberboard, about 3 [...]

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The logotype above is one of the most magnificent, perverse, and undeniably American things I’ve seen in my entire career. I love it. Like dirty love it. I have eight pieces of the company’s schwag around the studio (that I know of), including an old rusted-out weather vane a friend sent me. Dekalb is a [...]

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Today is apparently Spirit Day in the gay community, during which we’re all supposed to have a little pep rally and wear purple to show our solidarity against bullying. I’m not wearing purple. American culture has become over-saturated with meaningless symbols like this purple t-shirt affectation, “donating” our Facebook profiles against hunger for a day, [...]

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I don’t know why Opera isn’t making more noise in the browser market, considering the obvious thoughtfulness behind Håkon Lie’s suggestions. (If you don’t know his name, he’s the guy who created Cascading Style Sheets.) Håkon has developed a new proposal for generated content for paged media in CSS, which is kind of a big [...]

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As promised (on Twitter) after this post on your ownership rights as an employed designer, I asked my lawyer about the legal specifics. Here’s a summary of what he says. Mike Pickles, who owns MRP Business Law in Manhattan, is a good friend of about fifteen years—and a piranha (in the good way that keeps [...]

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An interesting confluence of writings in the media: several authors questioning the use of defaults (some several years ago), most using their exploration to define why usage of default systems are a terrible idea. The current overuse of default systems in visual design: Rob Giampetro and Rudy Vanderlans. Google’s efforts and spendings in keeping themselves [...]

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