Recently, purely for my own interests and obsessions, I’ve been putting together a new iPad magazine about longboards and longboarding. That’s very exciting, but there’s something special about working directly with real, tangible, non-virtual paper. Not just by putting ink on paper, I mean working with the material directly, playing with folds and overlapping planes. From a graphic design standpoint it can be quite enlightening to explore how graphics can be broken up into segments on a flat sheet of paper, but arranged so that they come together again when the sheet is folded up into the right shape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most people probably think of origami at this point. It probably says something about my maturity that I first think of paper airplanes instead, but I do find them fascinating – partly because they have a specific active function.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The paper airplane design that caught my eye recently was something rather different from anything I’d seen before. \u2018The Ring\u2019 is made from a simple circular ring of paper, with one edge folded to add a little mass. Unlike most regular paper airplane designs this requires a little tape as well as the paper itself to keep it in the ring shape, but as long as you can fold paper in a straight line it really is easy to make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n