Introduction or What is this all about?
This is a collection of lessons regarding the designing process of origami, which I learned through experience, most of it through trial and error.
Of course there are a lot of technical and mathematical theories regarding origami design, but they are quite complex. I strongly recommend reading Robert Lang´s book Origami Design Secrets. It covers the fundamentals of designing origami figures and I consider it the origami book, that had the by far biggest impact on me. However, Brandon Wong has a Youtube Channel featuring some design lessons etc. and Mu-Tsun Tsai has a blog, introducing a new fascinating desgn theory.
For now, general design theories are a little too technical for me (I don´t think I can do all the necessary math yet). Therefore, I´ll mostly write about impressions here. I´ll add “technical stuff”, as soon as I am able to solve it. Most of it willl be about the application of the design theories and some tips for your own designs. If you have some experience or if you know how to design a model in theory and if you want to get better at origami design, I`m sure you will be able to learn something from my experiences. All of the things I write about, I learned through trial and error. Therefore this will not resemble a detailed instruction (I´m no author). Rather short glimpses of things I think to be helpful to you.
Since this is going to be a lot, I´ll split it up into several pages. I think that is the most elegant way to structure my mess of thoughts. Here, I will sum up my experience in one sentence per aspect.
Table of contents
Designing
- Designing a new model
- When designing a new model, the most important part is keeping your goal in mind as simple as possible
- Important factors for a (good) crease pattern
- Increasing efficiency and the amount of details (usually) makes a crease pattern more complex
- Refining an existing design
- Taking a step back and refining may help to unlock the full potential of your designs.
- Choosing a system for the crease pattern
- Efficiency comes from the general layout of a design, not from the used system (e.g. Boxpleating or Hexpleating)
- Unusual systems (e.g. Tilted Grid, Hexpleating) allow more creative (and sometimes more efficient) general layouts
Folding
- Finding a reference
- a system for finding any grid
- Partial Collapse
- Partial collapses allow more complex models while increasing precision
This list is not yet complete. I´ll add more (pages as well as aspects) , when I´ve got the time (and aspects).
If you think you have something interesting, if you don´t agree with me in some aspects regarding origami design, feel free to leave a comment.