Shin Tanaka is a 28 year old graffitti artist from Fukuoka who has given a new life to paper toys. He's made them go and play in the street with new spanking looks reflecting hip hop, urban street culture, and pop art. His origami experiences has helped him to create blank template paper toys in which other artists can also draw into.

His paper toy project have now over 200 artists which some of them have been exhibited in the Kami Zoo exhibition. He is also one of the  designers of the toy company giant Play Imaginative.

Aside from paper toys, his illustrations and graffitti can be found also on Nike and Feiyue shoes.

The Ningyo-Do Bunko Database has released a collection of more than 100 albums of late 19th to early 20th century watercolour sketches of toy designs. All the images of the toy designs can be found from the sixty albums in the Kyosen Guangucho section of the website.

Similarly, the Akita Prefectural Library in Japan have a series of six toy design illustration books produced between 1891 and 1913 by Yamada from Kyoto. All the images archived have been cleaned up to one extent or another.

More watercolour illustrations of toy designs can be found here and here.

[Link and info via BibliOdyssey]

Lenovo’s design, known as the “Cloud of Promise”, was chosen over 300 competitor themes and will be carried by torchbearers around the world in the Olympic Torch Relay that precedes the Beijing Olympics. The design was unveiled on 26 April 2007, by the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) in the presence of the International Olympic Committee.

Since its inception in 1936, the Olympic torch has come to represent the history and culture of its host country and city. Lenovo’s unique approach for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Torch incorporates a sleek and modern design with historical Chinese symbolism. The primary theme of the torch’s artwork is clouds, which are intimately associated with Chinese culture and are often represented in works of Chinese architecture, drawing and painting, furniture and story-telling. Resembling an ancient scroll and featuring “lucky clouds”, the red and silver torch incorporated both traditional and modern Chinese elements. In Chinese mythology, deities ride flying on “xiangyun”, or lucky clouds. Chinese people expect the auspicious clouds to bring blessings and harmony.

Lenovo’s award-winning design team spent more than 10 months on the design of the torch. Altogether, more than 30 Lenovo design specialists were involved in the torch project including the core team of 10. The multinational team included designers from Germany, Singapore, US, Japan, New Zealand, Italy and China. The experience and specialties of the designers were equally diverse, and included majors in graphic design, chemistry, engineering, materials, anthropology, art and history. For months the teams engaged in intensive brainstorming, including game playing and creativity exercises, to help them look at the torch design from many different perspectives.

“Inspired by the shape of a traditional Chinese scroll, the imagery of the ‘Cloud of Promise’ represents the traditions of China, while the shape, texture and technology evoke the Olympic spirit,” said Yao Yingjia, Executive Director of Lenovo’s Innovation Design Centre in Beijing. “We approached the design of the torch with the same process we use in designing our personal computers. First we explore the connection between the user and the solution we create for them, looking at factors like size, weight, features, etc. Then we encourage the Lenovo design team to take a fresh approach to make the product uniquely and friendly to the customer. This is what we did with the torch, realizing it must be attractive to those who see it, and comfortab and light for those who carry it. In the case of the torch, our ‘customer’ is both the torchbearer and the spectator.”

See this video for behind-the-scene sketches and process in designing this unique torch.