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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

It's a very interesting article, particularly the observation that whimsy in law enforcement patches is giving way to military imagery. Not a happy trend.

But I don't think it's appropriate to call them beautiful. Disturbing, yes, but sophomoric, and many if not most of them look like they were made in MS Paint.

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I've designed a few patches over the years (military). The image submitted to the printer often varies wildly from the look of the finished patch. The forgotten part of this article is the artistic input from those actually building the patches. They take the vision and make it work in thread.

(FYI, the patches that really matter don't come in bright colors. Patches worn by actual operators, the people who put their lives on the line, use only muted colors, certainly not white or silver anything.)

What makes me laugh is seeing how these cops throw around military or legal symbols without any idea of what they mean. The lightning bolts mean something in the military. So too the skulls. And I don't think cops should be using the scales of justice. That is something reserved for judges. By adopting it they are basically declaring themselves judge and jury.

It's a little interesting to see the contrast between the DEA as a straight-laced government agency, and the patches they make. Frankly speaking, there's an "edginess" to it that's hard to reconcile with their public image.

This is similar to the extremely serious, straight-laced image doctors and other medical staff present to the public and their patients compared to the gallows humor expressed by them in private.

Many patients would probably be absolutely shocked by what gets joked about.

There’s a reason the “dirtbag leftists” at Chapo Trap House use the cocaine patch as their logo.

>and many if not most of them look like they were made in MS Paint.//

Isn't that just because of the limited pallet and resolution available with an [cheaply] embroidered badge.

Are there examples of cloth badges produced this way that have better design?

There are many NASA mission patches that are much better designed and produced in the same medium as these narc patches. The wobbly lines seen most of these drug patches are not inherent to embroidered patches.

Examples?

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81sNNKQk3uL... are ones using the same tech (by my eyeballing), they don't look so far off.

That's not a very good picture but they still look less crude than those drug patches. Google image search for "nasa embroidered mission patches" has better images than that for comparison, basically all look better than the drug ones, many by a wide margin.

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