You might have noticed that ThePaperGnome has been a bit sporadic lately. My life has been going through a lot of changes lately, both personally and professionally, and I think that it’s time that ThePaperGnome goes through some changes of its own. I’m still working on getting the new design for the site ready and have found a design team that I’m really excited to work with to help with the coding aspects.

I’ve also been doing a lot of brainstorming when it comes to content for ThePaperGnome. A lot of what I’ve been doing for the past year (almost) of blogging is curating things that inspire me on the internet, and adding little bits of design to help convince myself that I’m still a designer even if I don’t have my dream job, and brief glimpses of my work. I feel like I’m just regurgitating things I find on the internet and there isn’t enough of me on this blog. In the future, you can expect a lot more original content.

You can still look forward to collections of papercraft goodness, but as the title of this post suggests, I’m only going to post them once a month instead of weekly.  Starting today!

via: Jonathan Shackleton

I’ve seen these adorable little paper suits floating around Tumblr and Pinterest this month and I kept wondering what they were for. Now that I know, I like them even more. Designer Jonathan Shackleton was hired by Fedrigoni, an Italian paper company to create a marketing campaign that would introduce the UK market to their new paper selection tool which features 262 different paper samples. That sounds like a dream to me. Shackleton came up with the concept of printing templates onto those paper samples, so you can cut them out and assemble a dapper little suit, getting a feel for the paper and seeing how different patterns might work together for your project. It’s brilliant and adorable.

via: Zim and Zou

This is a super quirky project by French design duo, Zim and Zou celebrating the 30th birthday of  the restaurant Au Bon Gîte. The chef comes up with bimonthly menus, and Zim and Zou create a mask made up of the ingredients of that menu. In this case there’s asparagus, strawberries, onions, peas, rice, and ham on the bone. After seeing this first mask, I can’t wait to see the rest of the series.

via:  Sebastian Pelaez, Guillermo Siachoque, Gus Marioni, and Andrés Lancheros

This is part of a campaign for the Colsubsidio Book Exchange, and the concept is pretty straight forward. They took iconic characters and illustrated them as minimally as possible with paper. Must be a trend going around. Only last week I featured a similar minimal illustration of Gotye from Alysse Asilo.