You know when you’ve really made it in a field when people start sending you free stuff in hopes, I suppose, that your famousosity rubs off on the freebies. My moment of made-it-ness happened a few weeks ago, when I was contacted by the good folks at the X-acto (TM) Precision Instruments company, who were just DYING to send me their latest technical innovation: the Zirconium Nitride coated Z-series. Woo-hoo!

Now, if I were a marketing person selling a product whose primary purpose was cutting and my minions or overlord told me to seed the market strategically, I don’t think I would have said, “hey, let’s find someone in an art form whose primary defining characteristic is a total lack of cutting!” But then, that is probably why I am not a highly-paid marketing person and am, instead, a lowly paper-pusher.

So sending a knife kit to an origami person might seem crazy. But it’s crazy like a quick brown fox, eh? Because, of course, us origami folks need to acquire our squares to begin with (since paper manufacturers keep insisting on producing their paper in rectangles). And there’s nothing like a cutting mat, metal-edged ruler, and wickedly sharp X-acto (or similar) knife to cut the perfect square. And since even slightly dull blades like to wander away from from the metal ruler, I tend to buy my blades in the bulk economy 100-pack and to discard them at the first hint of slicing resistance.

(This practice also means that I have managed to impale myself in uncountable creative ways in the course of cutting squares. People ask if I ever get paper cuts, and those are quite rare; but knife cuts? I buy band-aids in the bulk economy size, too.)

So, the good folks at X-acto, no doubt realizing that the Achilles heel of all origami folders was a good cutting setup, sent a very nice Z-series knife (with gold knurling on the blade clamp) and a set of 5 ZrN-coated blades (with a lovely gold finish along the business edge) to try out.

(Actually, they sent me a HUGE box of other X-acto-related products, ranging from foamcore samples to a cute little cutting mat approximately 1/8 of the size of the one I use; all well and good, but I either already had or didn’t need any of the other goodies. But the storage box was quite nice and has found a good home.)

But as for the knife, the blades: I actually use these, and so went to try them out. (I thought about cutting right to the chase and impaling myself immediately just to get that part over with, but decided instead to let that happen in the natural course of events, by which I mean it will probably take place in a day or so.)

So, I can report the following: ZrN-coated X-acto knife blades cut paper very well indeed. And the gold-colored handle means that I can now tell my 2 knives apart so I can remember which one I just changed the blade in without having to look for the lighter bloodstains. (Guidebook photo to old and new style knives and blades is below.)

So, thank you, X-acto folks, for my snazzy new knife. And if any other vendors out there are looking for the Origami Stamp of Approval on their spiffy new product, why, there’s a contact link at the bottom of this very site!

(I’m thinking that ReferenceFinder would look pretty nice running on an iPhone 5, Tim Cook. Just sayin’.)

Top: old-style, boringly silver X-acto knife and blades. Bottom: Ultra-spifferino zirconium nitride-coated Z-series.

…blood, that is. In April, 2012, I was approached by the New Yorker magazine to create an origami mosquito as an illustration for an upcoming article. They knew me in part because I’ve done some origami illustration work for Wired magazine, which is part of Conde Nast, the parent company of them both. (Possibly a 2007 article by Susan Orlean in The New Yorker might also have played a role.) At any rate, they wanted Aedes aegypti, and I was more than happy to oblige.

In fact, getting someone to actually PAY me to design an origami insect is pretty wonderful. (In my entire 11-year professional origami career, I think that’s happened maybe four times.) Timing-wise, I did most of the design while I was on the road to the Asociacion Espanola de Papiroflexia convention (so any AEP-goers who saw me doodling and folding at the convention, that’s what I was working on). When I got back, I had two days between trips, so I pulled out the ol’ Origamido paper and set to folding. Then, since my next trip was to New York, I took it with me and dropped it off at their offices in person. (Which was also pretty cool. I mean, this was The New Yorker. Squee! )

After they did their photo shoot (a few days later), they shipped it off to my exhibition at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, TX, (scheduled to run through August 19, 2012). After that, it will probably return to the studio in Alamo, until the next exhibition calls for it.

I haven’t posted in quite a while, mostly because I’ve been bodaciously busy traveling on assorted origami business. The latest (and current) trip was to set up my exhibition at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, TX. We set everything up Thursday, then came back Friday morning for some finishing touches. I’d folded three white-tailed deer from largish paper (the buck from a 1.5-meter square of hanji, does from somewhat smaller squares) and set them up in the picture window of the gallery, which looks out onto the gardens. Lo and behold, when the sun was just right, the three deer were joined outside by three somewhat ghostly visitors outside:

The exhibit runs through August 19, 2012. Like most deer, the ones outside are crepuscular, with best sighting conditions in the early morning. The inside deer are visible throughout the day!

As you may have seen, the Google Doodle for March 14, 2012 is made of origami and celebrates the 101st birthday of Akira Yoshizawa, the father of the modern origami art. Origami has a multi-century history as a folk art in Japan, and Yoshizawa was not the only, or even the first, of his countrymen to take up the creation of new origami figures in the 20th century. But his work, more than anyone else’s, influenced the worldwide practice and set it on the path from craft to art (indeed, established origami as an art). He created thousands of new designs, developed new folding techniques, invented wet-folding, and designed the notational system that is still used today to convey origami instruction. So, all in all, he is a most worthy subject to be honored by a Google Doodle!

And why do I write about it here? Well, Google asked me to help put this together, which I was most happy to do, and they also asked me to write up a little bit about Yoshizawa and what I did for their Doodle blog. You can find that here, along with a permanent record of the Doodle.

Of course, if you are reading this at the right time, you can see the Doodle on the main Google page, “in the wild,” so to speak. (If you are reading this at all, it means that people following links to my website haven’t crushed the web server. If you aren’t able to read this, sorry, it means that they have, and the NetSol host is curled up in the corner, whimpering.)

The Google Doodle of the Day is nominally up for 24 hours, but by strategically visiting different Google servers, you can find it over a period of about a day and a half. It comes first to the easternmost national domain, which happens to be the island of Tonga, then works its way around the world. My own time zone (California, in Pacific Time Zone) is one of the later ones; my Hawaiian friends get the last shot at it.

Here’s how it all came about. A few weeks before the date, I was approached by Google. They already had the notion (they get suggestions from all over, I was told) and they already had a concept: they wanted to fold the Google logo with origami, and then decorate it with some of Yoshizawa’s figures. I suggested his iconic butterfly, to which they readily assented.

They asked me to develop a couple of concepts for different ways of rendering the logo. (That would have to be an original designs, of course.) I thought of three different ways of rendering the letters, folded the letter “G” for two of them (you can see them in the article linked above), but I really, really liked he second version after I’d folded it, so even before folding the third, I sent them the first two, hoping that they’d love the one I liked as much as I did and so I wouldn’t need to fold the last. And fortunately, they did.

At that point, two major efforts swung into action. One was mine: designing and folding the remaining logo letters. That was actually pretty easy. Although the crease patterns look superficially complex, the style of folding has been around for decades (it is the basis of the famous “Troublewit” magic routine), and there is a very straightforward technique for transforming any outline into the crease pattern.

The real heavy lifting came in the second effort: getting permission. Of course, no permission was needed, other than Google’s, to design and fold their logo. But if we were going to show Yoshizawa’s butterflies, we needed to get permission from his estate, which meant from his wife, Kiyo Yoshizawa, who manages his affairs and his organization, the International Origami Center. Mrs. Yoshizawa does not speak English and does not use email: our work was cut out for us.

For that effort, I enlisted two people from OrigamiUSA, the American national origami association: Jan Polish and Marcio Noguchi, both of whom have been deeply involved in international origami relations. Marcio, in turn, contacted Makoto Yamaguchi, owner of Gallery Origami House in Tokyo and one of the leading figures in Japanese origami today. Yamaguchi-san made contact with Mrs. Yoshizawa and secured the necessary permission, for usage of his butterfly, for use of Yoshizawa’s image in the photos in the article for the Google Doodle blog, and, most importantly, her blessing for the entire project.

Meanwhile, I designed and folded. Google wanted the letters folded in their traditional colors (or as close as we could get). I chose Canson Mi-Teintes watercolor paper, which comes in a wide range of colors so I could approximate the Google colors reasonably well. It also comes in fairly large sheets, so I could fold the letters in relatively large size (which allows a crisp appearance) and, because it is fairly stiff, it provides good contrast between the sharp creases and flat facets.

The pleated “Troublewit”-style letters allow for a deterministically computational design; in fact, the creases could be constructed using a method akin to compass-and-straightedge mathematical constructions. So the creation of the crease patterns was very fast, but that led to a problem: how to efficiently get the creases in the right place on the paper that was actually going to be folded?

Beginning a few years ago, I started to explore using an industrial laser cutter to score paper for origami crease patterns: initially using borrowed equipment at Squid Labs, courtesy of Saul Griffith, and then eventually obtaining my own system. By the time of the Google project, I had developed an efficient workflow that could take any crease pattern, process it with some custom software I’d written for Wolfram Mathematica, and turn that into a scored pattern on any sheet of paper.

So, I sic’d my scoring software onto the patterns for the Google letters, which transferred them crease patterns onto the Canson Mi-Teintes and cut out sheets of the appropriate sizes for the letters. An hour of so of folding the scored paper patterns resulted in the finished letters for the logo. And then that was followed by folding a range of butterflies from Origami Dokuhon I, Yoshizawa’s 1957 masterpiece.

The Thursday before D-day was set for photography. Two folks from Google showed up and spent a few hours arranging letters and butterflies for the shoot. I have a small photography setup in my studio that I use for shooting the images on the website. Via a process vaguely reminiscent of cooking nail soup, bits and pieces of my own setup gradually got incorporated into the Google shoot: seamless backdrop, halogen light, museum mount, wire, drafting tape, glue, and more. The Googlers had fairly definite desires on the colors and sizes of butterflies, so at their request, I’d bought a pack of 100 different colors of origami paper in preparation: they picked out colors, requested sizes, and then I cut the paper to size and folded butterflies to order.

One of the fun things about photo shoots is that the preparation can take hours as the subjects are arranged, tweaked, manipulated, re-tweaked, and test shot after test shot is made; but when everything is exactly right, the photographer takes one shot, says “that’s it!” and you’re done! And that was the case with this shoot. It was like climbing a mountain: you work your way up toward the top, getting closer and closer, and then boom: you’re there, nothing more to do.

A few shots from the photo shoot are below.

The precreased letters.

Folding in progress: collapsing the lower-case g.

My first draft, and some sample butterflies.

After folding the first round, I realized I was a little bit off in the x-height of the lower case letters, so I tweaked the crease patterns so that the letters would more closely match the logo letterforms.

Improved letters, with better x-height.

After everything was folded, the Google Doodle team came over and we set up to shoot (in my typically junky studio).

The shooting setup.

In order to line up the baselines when all of the letters were sitting on a flat surface, the lowercase “g” needed to be moved forward considerably. You can see here that it’s nearly cut off at the left. (It’s photos like this that explain why I’m not a professional photographer.)

Close-up of the letters with some butterflies

But when you’re at just the right angle, everything lines up!

The camera's eye view gets the baselines of the letters aligned.

And finally, after much tweaking, attachment of butterflies, and bouncing of photons, here’s the final result.

The Google Doodle for March 14, 2012

Update: I’d written a longer article about the “making-of” for Google’s blog, which was edited down for their final. I’ve combined that article with this one to tell the whole story; you can find it here.