Origami Legend Akira Yoshizawa Honored With Google Doodle
Many of you have likely fashioned a few paper cranes during your elementary school art careers and Google's homepage doodle today pays homage to the man many consider to be the father of origami, Akira Yoshizawa.Today is the Japanese artist's 101st birthday, and Google's logo has been "folded" into an origami creation.
"We're celebrating one of the all-time great origami artists - Akira Yoshizawa - with a logo folded by Robert Lang!" tweeted Marissa Mayer, vice president of location and local services at Google.
Origami comes from the Japanese - ori translates to folding and kami means paper. As About.com noted, no one person actually invented origami, but Yoshizawa is regarded as the artist who took origami from a craft to an art form.
Yoshizawa was born in 1911 and moved to Tokyo as a teenager. He worked in a factory and after he was promoted to technical draftsman, he used origami to teach the basic of geometry to new hires, About.com said. By 1937, he left his job to focus solely on his origami endeavors, which was not a particularly lucrative lifestyle. He didn't really gain notoriety for his craft until the 1950s when a Japanese magazine had him fold the signs of the zodiac for one of its issues. He later founded the International Origami Centre in Tokyo.
Yoshizawa died in 2005 from complications of pneumonia.
Robert Lang, meanwhile, has studied origami for 40 years and has had his work shown in museums around the world, from the Louvre to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1992, Dr. Lang became the first Westerner ever invited to address the Nippon Origami Association's annual meeting, according to his biography.
"Although he was the consummate artist, his work and approach was infused with the mathematical and geometric underpinnings of origami as well as a deep aesthetic sense," Lang wrote. "While there were other Japanese artists who explored their country's folk art contemporaneously with Yoshizawa, his work inspired the world through a combination of grace, beauty, variety and clarity of presentation. To him, each figure, even if folded from the same basic plan, was a unique object with a unique character."
If you want to try your hand at creating an origami Google logo, Lang said users can download a PDF of the crease patterns for each letter by clicking on the images in the blog post.
"The butterflies in the doodle are folded from one of Yoshizawa's earliest, yet most iconic designs," Lang concluded. "It is deceptive in its simplicity, but can express great subtlety in its shaping and attitude. The combination of simplicity and depth is part of the essence of origami, and is key to Yoshizawa's work and legacy."
In 2011, it was revealed that Google obtained a patent for its popular homepage doodles, covering "systems and methods for enticing users to access a Web site."
