Category Archives: Origami

Origami: Zoomisaurs

27 small, colourful origami dinosaur models arranged in a grid, seen from above

Zoom and gloom

During 2022, I unsurprisingly spent a lot of time working from home. Which, like most other people, meant a lot of time staring at Zoom video calls.

While I don’t (yet) need glasses, I’ve long struggled with glare-related headaches if I spend too long staring at a screen. This is fine when writing or coding, because I can continually take mini-breaks every few minutes and look around the room. This works especially well when writing text prose, because I can stare into the middle distance while touch-typing, without needing to look at the screen at all.

But video calls are a different matter. Even when I tried not to, I found I would keep looking at the screen as much as possible. Sometimes it would be to maintain the rough illusion of eye contact, sometimes just to focus on a someone else’s screen sharing. Either way, I was starting to get eye strain on days with many online meetings.

Eye contact (or the webcam facsimile of it) isn’t quite as important in team meetings when someone is sharing their screen. So I needed to find a way to force myself to take eye breaks during these regular meetings.

Part health, part challenge, part art project

One day I found the answer thanks to two items I already had lying around the house. One was a pack of 400 post-it sized (7.5cm-sided square) origami papers in various colours (thank you, Daiso). The other was John Montroll’s book Dinosaur Origami, which I’ve owned for many years. I had made some of the models in the book, but not all. Many of them were simple enough to be folded from small paper. But while the models start off easy, they do get progressively harder.

So a challenge was born. I would attempt to fold all 27 dinosaur origami models in the book using identically-sized small papers. But I would only fold them during Zoom calls. This wasn’t going to be a quick challenge — just a bit here, a bit there. Sometimes my full attention is needed in the calls. But at other times all I need to do is listen, which is the perfect time to fold. That way I let my eyes focus on other things, while still being present in conversations.

With a variety of colours to choose from, I realised I could also do them in a neat rainbow order. Therefore my health-prompted folding challenge also turned into a bit of an art project.

This doesn’t need to be a big long ramble, so here they are: The Zoomisaurs.

27 small, colourful origami dinosaur models arranged in a grid. In front of them are a small piece of paper and a pencil to indicate scale. The smallest model is a quarter of the pencil's length, and the largest is half the pencil's length.
Shown with a square of paper and a mechanical pencil, for size/scale reference
27 small, colourful origami dinosaur models arranged in a grid. In front of them are a small piece of paper and a pencil to indicate scale. The smallest model is a quarter of the pencil's length, and the largest is half the pencil's length.
A difference angle with scale reference
27 small, colourful origami dinosaur models arranged in two diagonal lines. Each line is arranged in order of the colours of the rainbow.
Rainbows!

27 dinosaur models, almost entirely folded during Zoom calls in 2022, from 7.5cm square paper. The final stegosaurus model required just a bit too much concentration and accuracy (and tweezers), so it had to be completed once I’d finished working for the day.

Close-up view of 8 small origami dinosaur models, with some others out of focus in the background
Close-up view of 6 small origami dinosaur models, with some others out of focus in the background
Close-up view of 10 small origami dinosaur models
Close-up view of 10 small origami dinosaur models
A small blue origami brachiosaurus model stands on top of the head of an orange cat. The cat is resting by a window and looks unamused.
Conquering new frontiers
A small dark blue origami stegosaurus model stands on top of the head of an orange cat. The cat's ears are taller than the model, which looks like it's grazing among the fur.
Traditional stegosaurus grazing location, nestled between a cat’s ears

Origami: JS Logo

A few years ago I wanted to try to design an origami version of the JS logo. This is the widely-used community logo for the JavaScript programming language. (There’s no “official” logo for the language, but that’s a whole other story that’s not relevant for this post.)

Original community JS logo

I did this not because it was particularly wanted by anyone, but simply as an interesting challenge—possibly one not attempted before. As documented elsewhere, I wasn’t experienced at designing origami models at that point. I broke it down into chunks, trying separate “J” and “S” designs. To keep things simple, I started with pixel-like shapes for the letters (90° angles only), then chucked in some 45° angles if I could get away with it.

After a fair bit of trying different techniques and refining folds, I ended up with the most efficient models I could think of. (“Efficient” in this case means using the smallest possible starting size of paper. Every bit of paper tucked away out of sight is effectively wasted; efficiency is minimising how much paper is wasted.)

But trying to combine the models together into a single “JS” design was beyond me. The differences in fold placements combined with the off-centre placement of the letters was too much. I knew I had to be missing some fundamental design technique that would unlock what I wanted to do. In the end I put it aside for a while… which became several years.

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Origami: Platypus

In my previous post, I said:

Over a few years I’ve been building up a list of subjects I could attempt to design. This most recent lockdown is when I finally decided to bite the bullet and make a proper go of it.

Well, this is the first attempt at doing that. After deciding I wanted to primarily design Australian animals, the question was which one to start with. The title of this post not withstanding, the answer was… a box jellyfish.

I was intrigued by the combination of a small, cube-like body and incredibly long tendrils. (The tendrils of an Irukanji box jellyfish can be over 100 times longer than its bell.) I had an idea in my head of how to do it. But once I started trying it out, the limitations of paper thickness started to interfere with the shape I wanted to achieve.

In the end I got… some kind of jelly-like creature, but it wasn’t entirely what I was aiming for.

A poorly-folded origami model of a jellyfish

Realistically I knew that that approach was a bit of a dead-end, so I moved on to animal target number 2.

Actually a platypus this time

I love platypuses (or platypodes, but never platypi) as a distinctly Aussie creature. But I hadn’t seen any great representations of them in origami. This became my main focus. To avoid burying the lede any further, I ended up with something I’m really proud of.

A folded origami platypus model, viewed from the front
Paper: Shadow-fold copper/black from origami-shop.com
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A little story about origami

Opens​ blog, blows off the dust, sweeps away the cobwebs.

Apparently I haven’t published a blog post in 2 years (something something pandemic). Time to see if these old writing muscles still work.

During 2020–21 I withdrew a lot from doing tech stuff. Online-only meetups were unenjoyable, and I stopped watching video recordings from conferences, stopped working on my own open source stuff, stopped writing blog posts. What little coding I did do was limited to simple scripts, or very occasional contributions to the MDN compat data project. (In fact, that was a topic of a different blog post that I never got around to finishing.)

With enforced working from home and spending all day staring at a screen of code in my room, I really didn’t want to spend more time doing the exact same thing at night.

What I did instead was throw myself back into the world of origami.

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