Designs of the Day

At this point, it is clear that my goal of producing a design each day that would be worthy of posting online was a bit too ambitious. I have spent time almost every day this year doing design work (minus a couple of days of moving into my new apartment). I think one problem I ran into was the same problem I had last year. I kept wanting to outdo myself each time, until it became difficult to continue working at that rate. The time required for each project would increase each time. I realize that this is just my pefectionism kicking in. In order to rein this in, I will change the parameters slightly. I want to keep developing my design skills, so I will continue to do design work every day. I will post once each week with highlights of the week's work. It may be one big project, seven small renderings, or something completely different. It will turn into "designs of the day", instead of "[intermittent] design of the day". I guess I will post on Monday nights for now, but that may change later.

The thing that I will post today is a small collection of photos of an origami tesselation I created. I designed it using a computer program I found online. Little did I know that the design I made was probably one of the more complex and difficult tesselations I could make. I modified the output in Illustrator, and printed it onto a piece of paper.



I cut a section out, and then creased all of the lines, some on one side, some on the other, which took a long time. I then spent probably an hour to collapse the model into what you see here, which is less than half the size it started as. One thing that made it difficult was that it all had to be folded together more or less simultaneously. It was very tricky to fold, but eventually I figured out the patterns, and saw which sections would have to be the highest and lowest points, and that helped in the process. One cool part about origami tessellations is that they create beautiful light patterns when backlit.






I will continue to explore this form of origami occasionally, but for now I want to do just try folding and understanding many different models, with the intention of eventually being able to design my own. I have been inspired by finding tons of amazing examples of origami sculptures online recently, and learning some of the methods of model design. Some of the masters whose works I have been marveling at include Robert Lang, Michael Lafosse, Eric Joisel, Satoshi Kamiya, Brian Chan, Jason Ku, Hojyo Takashi, Tomoko Fuse, Akira Yoshizawa, Issei Yoshino, and many more. I encourage anyone with an interest to look them all up. Prepare to be awestruck.