Origami alphabet

If you're into origami and/or the alphabet, you'll love this template that shows you how to fold 3D letters of the alphabet out of paper. It appears to be part of a computational puzzle series designed at MIT.

The crease pattern by itself provides a kind of encoding of a maze, which can be decoded by folding. We applied this idea to encode textual messages in crease patterns that can be decoded by folding. Figure 1 shows a simple font we designed with the constraint that each character is a small orthogonal maze.... (With larger dimensions, the font might be easier to read, but harder to fold.)

Origami maze puzzle font [via Kottke]

• [dw_funk]

  I think the italics coming down the page maybe comes from this post?

• [Jonathan Badger]

  When I saw that this dealt with origami and was from MIT I guessed that Erik Demaine was involved somehow, and lo and behold he’s the first author of the paper.

• [jeligula]

  The letter V requires the largest amount of paper. Who knew?

• [SkullHyphy]

  Wow, that was pretty neat learning to read that alphabet that looks like indecipherable scraps from an architect’s waste bin. The elements are pretty simple: the right angle, the three-way intersection, the line termination and the empty space. Now I guess I’ll have to find out whether I can actually fold this.

• [maryr]

  Ah, Erik Demaine. Forever cemented in my mind as the first person I heard of becoming a professor who is younger than me. In my defense, I was a college junior at the time.

• [ablestmage]

  Origami generally refers to paper-folding crafts that begin with a square piece of paper, and fashioned without cutting anything. Papercraft, however, applies to both cut/uncut, square/nonsquare, etc. Although the original Japanese technique of origami may not have been so emphatic on such rules, the modern technique of the more popularized version of origami is.