Finishing that one origami book my aunt gave me when I was six could have been the most influential part that shaped my passions in life. Ever since then, I've been hooked. From watching YouTube videos to reading design books to attending and teaching at OrigamiUSA conventions in New York and OrigaMIT at MIT every year, origami has always been a big part of my life.
Reading anything from Robert J. Lang, but especially this book is essential to getting started with design. Every single YouTube video or any paper on origami design always has something derived from this book. I love this book because it gives a broad overview of most of the techniques and ideas you need to know to design your own origami.
This book is great for building the intuition behind design. What's unique is that it introduces you to the theory along with a model, and then gives you hard challenges to complete to stretch your thinking on how to bring the theory to life. Afterwards, it gives an explanation of how the author completed the challenge and exactly how they went about doing it.
This book by Satoshi Kamiya introduced me to complex and supercomplex origami models. With the massive and tedious models it contains, I spent hours collapsing, shaping, and attempting to understand them, which got me to appreciate both the art and the science behind creating lifelike models. What I love about this book is that Kamiya isn't scared to include models that might be too complex for many people, pushing the boundaries of what's possible!
