Monday, April 9, 2012

Origami

Sarah and I were fortunate enough to both host Japanese exchange students and visit Japan as exchange students when we were 12-13 years old. Mixed in with learning a bit of Japanese, drinking lots of barley tea, and visiting the Great Buddha of Kamakura was a lot of folding. We folded small square sheets of beautifully designed paper into all sorts of animals (lots of cranes), paper balloons and more. Usually mine ended up looking like deranged, mangled cranes with worn out seams from multiple messed up fold lines. I certainly learned to appreciate the complexity of the art of origami.

Much to my surprise, I was taken back to 1987 when opening my CoDesign morning email last week. Low and behold there's a new typeface, and it's free no less, called Typogami. Inspired by origami, the letters look like they're made from folded paper. Pretty unique if you ask me. Not sure how many projects will be coming in where an origami typeface is a good fit, but it's nice to know it's there if you need it.

Anyway, I'm off to download the new font now, you can download it too if you'd like, the link is in this article: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669461/typogami-an-animated-typeface-inspired-by-origami

Perhaps I'll even dig up some of the old origami paper and try my hand at crane making again.