Before we start, I want to point out that there's a big crease on the book that is noticeable on the photos, I blame USPS for that.
The title “We Are Paper Toys” is spot on, the book features 32 of the most popular and well known paper toy designers and customizers today.
Each designer featured has his/her picture shown, the URLs associated to their work and where they’re from. Alongside that is a mini interview /statement on which they share the reasons on why they love paper toys and what it means to them and photos of their paper toy creations (with mini templates to tease you :)
Each photo has a proper title, description, and the name of the designer/customizer who worked on it.
Some designers shared their sketches and concept art as well, which, besides the mini interviews and photos is my favorite part of the book. With these sketches, you get to see how they actually transformed them from a simple 2D idea to a real life 3D object that you can touch and hold.
It is a very gorgeous book, the photos used are hi-res and print quality is exquisite, you will not want to cut it out ^^. And that takes us to the one thing that I found to be odd - the full-page templates, it doesn’t really detract from the overall quality of the book but I just didn’t find them necessary.
I’m not sure if the author intended for them to be cut-out, but if they were, the full-page templates are printed on the regular pretty page of the book, it takes up one side of a whole page (remember a page has two sides) and the other side has photos. If you cut out the template then you’ll be cutting the pretty photos on the other side. I would have preferred that the full-page templates were printed on their own tear-out sheet.
And if they weren’t meant to be cut out, then I guess they serve as a pretty filler – since most of the templates, if not all, are included in the accompanying CD.
Yes, that’s right, it comes with a CD full of paper toys for you to print, cut, fold, and glue (80+ templates – will surely keep you busy this summer).
Here is the CD interface, it runs on Macromedia Flash Player 8 (a multimedia and application player). In order to run the CD you’ll need to have Adobe Flash Player installed on your computer, or you can just open the CD (without AUTOPLAY) to get straight to the content.
All the templates in the CD are in PDF format. To view the PDF files, you’ll need Adobe Reader.
So to sum it up, this book is a compendium of photos, artwork, sketches, and templates of paper toys from the 32 designers, most of which you can find in their respective web sites. Besides being a paper toy book, I would also categorize this as a photo book – it is that pretty.
So who is it for? definitely a must buy for paper toy / papercraft collectors, it shows you the who’s who in the paper toy scene and features their most prominent works. It’s also a good beginners book if you intend on introducing friends or family (or anyone else for that matter) into our craft, the pictures alone will do the selling ^^
Once again, the book is called We Are Paper Toys: Print-Cut-Fold-Glue-Fun
by Louis Bou and published by Collins Design - an imprint of HarpersCollins Publishers, it will be available online and in stores on June 15, 2010.Special thanks to Ms. Meredith Rusu / HarperCollins Publishers for the review copy.