Francis Ow’s website has the useful feeling of opening somebody’s workshop after they are gone and finding the shelves still labeled.
Visit Francis Ow’s origami site
Ow was a Singaporean origami designer whose work ranged through geometric folds, modular constructions, letterfolds and especially origami hearts. His site preserves publications, diagrams, biographical notes and the network of origami organizations he participated in around the world.
The homepage now carries the sad fact plainly: Francis died in 2018 after a long illness.
The site remains.
Paper designs survive surprisingly well as webpages
Origami is unusually suited to the old web because the important unit is often a sequence of diagrams rather than a video personality.
Ow’s pages document books such as Origami Hearts, More Origami Hearts, Modular Origami, Letterfolds and Origami – Geometrical Folds. His publishing history moved from self-published ring-bound collections shared with friends into formal publication through origami organizations and commercial publishers.
That trail matters because craft knowledge is often scattered across convention booklets, small-run publications and personal exchanges that were never built for permanent discovery.
The web gave designers like Ow another shelf.
His own account traces his interest back to childhood and to Robert Harbin’s television programs and Paper Magic. That personal thread is more useful than a generic biography because it shows how a specialist tradition passes from one enthusiast to another: broadcast, book, practice, design, publication, website.
For folders looking for specific models, researchers tracing modern origami, or people studying mathematical paper folding, these old personal pages remain a practical index into one person’s body of work.
This site was found in CacheRat’s broader Ancient Web research corpus.
Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list
A lot of personal websites disappear with their authors. Francis Ow’s did not. The diagrams, books and folding history are still sitting there waiting for the next person with a square sheet of paper.