Patrick Sisson - Writer, Journalist, Cultural Documentarian, Music Lover

Category: Design

Article/Interview Nothing Major August 20, 2013 Link When Bata Shoe Museum Senior Curator Elizabeth Semmelhack first began assembling the exhibit that would become Out of the Box: The Rise of Sneaker Culture (on display in Toronto through March 30, 2014), she hit up the right contacts. Erik Blam, manager of Run-D.M.C., and Bobbito Garcia, author of the sneaker bible Where’d […]

Article/Interview Nothing Major August 2013 Link  History—and city skylines—tend to be constructed by the winners, but that’s never the whole story. Alexander Eisenshmidt, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, discovered the truth of this maxim while researching unfinished Chicago building projects and collecting a dossier of grandiose proposals, eccentric dreams, and impossible ideas that […]

Feature Nothing Major July 19, 2013 Link   In the second installment of our Portland Design Guide, we zero-in on stores and galleries with a focus on the handmade and hands-on. From a legendary outdoor brand to the nation’s oldest craft musuem, Portland offers a range of designers and designed objects reinterpeting the region’s design heritage […]

Feature Nothing Major July 19, 2013 Link The Austrian-born, typography-tweaking graphic designer takes a stark view on what makes us tick in his latest exhibition, The Happy Show. Photo: John Madere For an art installation that examines what makes us feel good, Stefan Sagmeister’s The Happy Show, on display at the Chicago Cultural Center through […]

Helping a Bakery Rise Up and Reach Out Blue Sky Bakery & Café Case Study EPIC Link Blue Sky Bakery & Café in North Center serves the community in both senses of the word, providing baked goods and sandwiches as well as job training and employment experience to homeless and at-risk youth. For teens hungering […]

Feature Nothing Major June 21, 2013 Link With Rio racing to prepare for 2016, Brazilian protests against stadium spending raging and the price tag for the Sochi Winter Olympics rising precipitously, the subject of infrastructure spending for the bi-annual games is a heated one. But it’s the second life of these structures which often leave […]

Feature Nothing Major April 19, 2013 Link Lost albums and self-made musicians are profiled in a sprawling new book on DIY recordings. As the ritual of hunting down limited-edition vinyl for Record Store Day begins, music fans can turn to a new book about private press recordings to see what limited really means. Enjoy The […]

Post Nothing Major March 25, 2013 Link Designers Erin Huizenga and Deborah Alden are the types that get invited for coffee to talk shop. Both also teach at schools like Northwestern and IIT Institute of Design and work with socially conscious organizations like Firebelly University (where Alden was Dean) and EPIC (which Huizenga founded). But […]

Post Nothing Major March 25, 2013 Link Even in the age of streaming video, the vast majority of the information we consume online is in the form of type. While sophisticated typography may be a given in an era of web fonts, a new exhibition from famed font and imaging firm Monotype showcases the painstaking […]

Article/Interview Nothing Major March 25, 2013 Link The chances are good that you’re reading this article on your smart phone. It shouldn’t be news that, increasingly, mobile design is synonymous with web design. But while the ability to read anything anywhere isn’t noteworthy anymore, the new ways that designers shape and deliver content—from a new […]