What do our faces say about who we are?

Lee Crutchley’s Quoteskine website features hand-drawn typography.

I recently presented at the Future Trends conference in Miami. My presentation was called ‘Good Ideas in 2010′ and it is the first part of a project to deliver a book later this month with the same title.

At this year’s 100% Design Event, designer Yu Jordy Fu created ‘cloud walk’, a nine-meter-long white recycled paper chandelier inspired by ancient Chinese paper cutting techniques.

Yuken Teruya strikes a balance between consumerism and environmental consciousness with his latest exhibition of paper bags. Using only the material provided by the bag, he carefully cuts out delicate, miniature trees and places them inside the bags.
[ via Jean Snow ]

This papercraft castle complete with functioning lights and a train system, was created over 4 years by Wataru Itou, an art student in Tokyo.

Hoping to do something about the less than 0.05% of milk and juice cartons in the US that ever end up recycled, Portland industrial designer John Schreiber created Milkmuny, producing highly-functional wallets from the familiar paper cartons we regularly discard. Milkmuny pays local groups seeking to raise funds for the cartons they collect, and after washing them, create wonderful multi-pocketed wallets through an intricate folding process—$10 each, with a 45 day warranty and a percentage of sales donated to environmental groups. Schreiber explains that
“I wanted to challenge traditional design thinking and create a mass produced product that didn’t expend more [...]

Whitelines Notebooks uses a very simple, intuitive design idea: the only thing that should stand out on a page is what you write. The company’s designers realize that lined and graphed paper helps ensure steady writing and legibility, but counter that these guides should never compete with one’s note taking. Instead of dark lines, Whitelines use, shockingly, white lines, traced over a very light gray paper. The overlay is perfectly contrasted, offering a balance of visibility and subtly. Whitelines also strives to keep the carbon footprint associated with their notebooks’ fabrication as close to zero as possible; they trap and [...]

Wurlington Brothers Press have an interesting line of postcards that can be transformed into scale models of different New York City landmarks. The 4-5/8″ x 6-3/4″, legally mailable cards each include all pieces and instructions needed to make one model. The “Build Your Own New York” series has tiny paper versions of New York’s most famous buildings, monuments and trains. There is also a Chicago version.
Build Your Own New York

Inhabitat points us to a good-looking line of alternative paper products. New Leaf Paper’s Farm Fiber Collection features papers made of recycled banana or palm tree fibers collected as a harvest byproducts.
[via Inhabitat]

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Playwright and programmer Llewellyn Hinkes has a brilliant essay over at The Morning News which explores how people tend to assign and associate memories, emotion, meaning and significance to physical objects – what he describes as a kind of fetishisation. And he wonders about the decreasing value and significance we place on all the digital, formerly physical objects in our lives.
In one insightful passage, Hinkes talks about why the tangible holds so much value for people:
there is something very primal in coveting and collecting things. It’s more akin to a low-level obsessive-compulsive desire for memories. Having memories stored in a [...]

Toilet paper is perhaps one of the least environmentally friendly products on the planet. As bizarre as that sounds, think about it – it’s a one-time use product that is made using valuable resources which can’t be reclaimed for use in future products. Even more disturbing is that virgin timber from rare old-growth forests in Canada are being used to make the ultra-premium varieties of toilet paper. The New York Times reports that major manufacturers are taking steps to introduce versions with higher levels of recycled content, but these don’t currently sell as well as the thick, cushy variety.
The Times [...]