Project
Paper Trails
About
Paper Trails is an inspiration book of archived modern ephemera for designers. With each section, the printing material changes to reflect the nature of the ephemera, offering an alternative to the industry’s reliance on flat digital work.
Processes & Tools
Bookbinding – Digital Printing – Laser Cutting – Adobe InDesign
Year
2025
Paper Trails: Archiving Modern Ephemera
Everything is designed. From parking tickets, to event flyers, to price stickers to clothing labels. These everyday mundane pieces of paper have all gone through some sort of transformative design process to become transient, ephemeral objects with which we interact, without a second thought.
Paper Trails exists as a portable book of everyday inspiration for graphic designers, archiving unnoticed creativity into a tactile and interactive book. With each section, the material changes to reflect the nature of the ephemera, pushing designers to focus on the grounding effect of the physical senses – something which is often overlooked with today’s over-reliance on flat digital aesthetics.
Paper Trails: Archiving Modern Ephemera
This project went through multiple prototypes and iterations to capture the feeling of being an ephemeral objects. My aim was to create a non-standard size book which used elements of my collected ephemera to embody the transient nature of the imagery inside. Using laser-cut MDF for the covers allowed me to play with shapes and materials, introducing different tactile surfaces throughout the book to represent the different objects.
This book is almost a glorified scrap-book of unseen designed items, but as an avid collector of modern ephemera, it was also the culmination of my collection of under-appreciated graphic mementos that would have been unappreciated.
