Awesome Paper

This series of notebooks from Cognitive Surplus has detailed cover images inspired by science, nature, and math. Inside each journal, you’ll find 208 pages of 5.8″ x 8.3″ black paper with a 50/50 mix of lines and grid dots. They’re perfect for taking notes and making doodles with their high-opacity gel pens.

This artfully animated short film by filmmaker Kei Kanamori took home Silver in the 51st Student Academy Awards. Its concept is simple, but its execution is sublime – as a magical character transforms folded sheets of CG-animated paper into living plants and creatures. Think Fantasia, but with paper.

Paper artist Pei Haozheng used his steady hands and razor-sharp scissors to cut the longest contiguous strip of paper from a single sheet of A4 paper – just slightly smaller than U.S. letter size. The finished strip measured over 108 meters (354 ft.) long and Pei arranged it to look like a slice of a human brain and his signature.

The Instagram page for keta_valve has a strange assortment of industrial equipment and DIY animations of pandas. This video falls into the latter category, showing off a clever animation technique that uses an iPhone moving through a sequence of paper cutouts to create motion. Watching how it was made was just as entertaining as the finished animation.

Zenlet’s Memo X is unique gadget that turns any paper you want into removable sticky notes. It combines cutting and adhesive application into a single step. Slide a sheet of paper into its slot, press down, and in a second you’ll have a custom sticky note in one of three sizes. A $4 roll of tape makes about 250 notes.

In 2020, more than 120 billion pieces of cardboard were used to pack and ship items in the U.S. – and that number keeps growing. Cardboard is also one of the world’s most successfully recycled materials. New Mind digs into the history, science, and success of the ubiquitous corrugated paper.

Does somebody in your life need a blessing or a curse? Grab a sheet of Knock Knock’s Paper Voodoo! Simply fill in your desired outcome and rationale, how you’d like your spell delivered, and draw black or white pins in the recommended regions on your subject’s avatar.

CGP Grey’s Cortex brand created the Sidekick, a wide-format notepad that works hand-in-hand with your computer workspace. It sits between you and your keyboard and has a large, gridded area for sketching and a narrow space for to-do lists on the right. It’s made with 60 pages of premium Munken Lynx paper with a cover made from recycled coffee cups.

Jonny Builds set out to make a tabletop using a similar style to Micarta knife handles. After testing with large sheets of paper, he started over with thousands of small sheets of colored paper and laminated them with epoxy in a vacuum bag. After flattening its surface with a CNC machine, he carved a water ripple pattern and coated it with clear epoxy.

When you cover things with resin and let them harden, they can be carved on a lathe, just like wood. In this video from Wood Workshop they show how combining blocks of wood with stacks of colored paper can produce an eye-catching work of functional art.

This book of Japanese patterns is great for making your own origami sculptures. It’s packed with 200 sheets of 6-inch paper squares printed with intricate designs in shades of blue and white with solid colors on the back. Great for making collages or papier-mâché projects too.

Other than bank statements and bills, we don’t find ourselves shredding too much paper these days. Artist Japhy Riddle took a paper shredder and turned it into a vehicle of sorts. Rather than applying power to its wheels, the shredder car moves as it pulls a roll of tractor-feed paper through its shredding teeth.

Burls Art has made a name for himself by creating guitars out of unusual materials. This time, he laminated 700 sheets of newspaper to form a wood-like block. The result is an incredibly cool instrument with a vintage look, visible paper layers along its edge and neck, and historical newspaper headlines on its front and back.

Field Notes teamed up with renowned Minneapolis printer Studio on Fire to create these hot-foil stamped memo books.  They feature fencing-inspired artwork by Aaron Draplin stamped in silver foil on Indigo blue cover stock. The set of three notebooks comes packed in a silver paper tuck box with blue foil. Field Notes subscribers get a bonus gold and red edition.

These wall decals look like giant sheets of ruled notebook paper but work like dry-erase whiteboards. The set of decals is easy to place and remove from walls and includes four sheets in sizes from 8.2″ W x 8.8″ L to 16.5″ W x 23.5″ L.

If there’s one thing humans use a lot of, it’s toilet paper. This video from Process X takes us inside Japan’s Marutomi Paper Co., a factory that cranks out millions of rolls of the stuff every month. They start with stacks of paper pulp that they wet and press into massive rolls, which they then print, wrap around cores, and slice.