Posts: design
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Computational Origami
This page contains links to computational tools useful for origami design and for combining origami with mathematical or scientific applications. See here for additional links about origami math, science, and technology. See here for additional links not specifically related to mathematical and scientific origami. If you’ve got a computational origami tool you’d like listed, send […]
Continue ReadingMaking of Mitsubishi
The Artist’s Commentary In October, 2005, I was contacted by MJZ, a production company in Los Angeles, who were working on a new commercial about the Mitsubishi Endeavor SUV for the advertising firm BBDO. BBDO’s concept was to have the car drive through an “origami world.” They needed an origami artist to design and fold […]
Continue ReadingCommercial Art
I have created a range of commissioned works for commercial projects, some of which are shown on this page. They illustrate just a bit of what is possible with origami used for commercial advertising. (See my page on monumental origami for further examples.) To make a figure look right for advertising, various origami genres can […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge at OrigamiUSA
In 2003, Daniel Robinson, Satoshi Kamiya, and I were sitting together at the OrigamiUSA annual meeting, talking about the process of composition and design and comparing thoughts and ideas. Brian Chan’s “Kraken Attack”, from 2006. I should mention that this is not at all unusual. Origami, unlike many other fields, is remarkably collegial, and the […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge 2010
The 2010 challenge was: Cars and Trucks. In recent years, we’ve stuck with the natural world, but this year we decied to visit man-made objects. A selection of the year’s entries are shown below. Brian Chan and I each took on sports cars, with the idea of doing the wheels in a way different from […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge 2009
The 2009 design challenge was one of the four nonhuman great apes: Gorilla, Orangutan, Chimpanzee, or Bonobo. The last few design challenges have been very open-ended, which has allowed artists to display great creativity in subject. For this next challenge, however, we decided to constrain the subject to emphasize implementation—and in particular, to challenge the […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge 2008
The 2008 design challenge was a prehistoric non-dino from an uncut square. What does that mean? Well, there are many, many dinosaurs in origami, but there are also many prehistoric creatures that are as cool, or cooler, than dinos, but have not yet been realized in origami. So whether one is an aficionado of the […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge 2007
The 2007 design challenge was to fold an entire plant from an uncut square. There are many origami plants (you can see several in my own gallery), but nearly all origami plants are either composite, i.e., from multiple sheets of paper, or only partial plants (like a leaf, or blossom). The challenge this year was […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge 2006
The topic of the 2006 design challenge was a sailing ship. It wasn’t that this topic hadn’t been done before; the symbol of OrigamiUSA is a simple traditional sailboat, and on the complex side, Pat Crawford’s brilliant “Full-Rigged Sailing Ship” is one of the most well-known origami figures in existence. But Crawford’s ship dates from […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge 2005
Attack of the Hermit Crabs! At the 2004 OrigamiUSA convention, Satoshi and I examined each other’s Eupatorus (and unmercifully razzed Dan Robinson for his no-show). It had been an enjoyable challenge, and so we decided to try it again for the following year. The subject we chose was a hermit crab—a type of crab that […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge 2004
The original design competition was for a Eupatorus gracilicornis beetle, which makes a good subject for origami because of its large number of hornlike protrusions. ( See here for some examples of the real thing.) Although 3 of us originally agreed to take on this subject, Daniel Robinson was otherwise occupied, so only Satoshi Kamiya […]
Continue ReadingCrease Patterns for Folders
In recent years, a new form of written instruction has become common within the modern art of origami: the crease pattern (often referred to by its abbreviation, CP). Conventional origami diagrams describe a figure by a folding sequence — a linear step-by-step pattern of progression. Crease patterns, by contrast, provide a one-step connection from the […]
Continue ReadingOrigamiUSA’s The Fold
Starting in November, 2010, I began writing a regular column on crease patterns (with occasional forays into other topics) for OrigamiUSA’s then-new online publication, The Fold. You’ll need to be a member of OrigamiUSA to read the articles, but in my highly biased opinion, it’s well worth the cost (not just for my articles, but […]
Continue ReadingReferenceFinder
Background Update (2024): Mu-Tsun Tsai has created a web-based version of ReferenceFinder (and fixed a longstanding bug in the original source code along the way). He is continuing to develop this version: follow it here. You can also find the original source code (with bug corrected) on my own GitHub repo. During the development of […]
Continue ReadingSpeaking of Butterflies
One of the oldest, simplest, and to my mind, most deceptively difficult of all origami subjects is the butterfly. It is so simple, because all you really need are two wings: one can make a quite recognizable one with just two folds. And there are many origami butterfly designs out there, notably Yoshizawa’s iconic creation. […]
Continue ReadingThe Haverhill Fritillary
Some figures take hours or days of careful design; others are quick doodles based on exploration of an idea. My latest posting is one of the latter. It started out as just a technical puzzle: “can I add A to B?” But it turned out to have a nice and relatively novel folding sequence, so […]
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