Journey with Traveling on Paper
Featured Artist this week: TOP Studio
New in the shop this week: Discover the subtle details that make Traveling on Paper's original designs a compelling exploration of both travel and journaling life.
TOP Studio's solo and collaborative works stylishly capture a wide-ranging appreciation for travel, both in life and on paper, and the ways it enriches the spirit and challenges us to grow, gain perspective, feel deeply, and transform.
If you aren't yet familiar with Traveling on Paper (紙上旅行), the Taiwanese stationery store and design studio of Tracy Liao, you may enjoy peeking at some prior works as context.
One of the enduring qualities in TOP Studio's aesthetic that I most enjoy is a calm, graceful elegance, with soothing colors and structured elements working in harmony. To me, this delicate balance conveys strength in gentleness. If you're drawn to chic, modern design with hints of nostalgia, in classic, neutral palettes, TOP's style may resonate especially strongly for you.
Tracy's travel-inspired Journey collection, combining photography with relatable words and phrases for stationery lovers, comes to a soft, soulful conclusion with Vol. 3: "End Of," featuring a pair of PET tapes titled {last chapter} and {soft ending}.
These final tapes in her Journey series offer a stirring array of poetic fragments and hauntingly beautiful scenery for decorating your journal pages. Together they capture a nuanced balance of bittersweet longing, joyful memories, and reverence for life as an ever-changing story.
They may even entice you to reflect on your personal journey.
- How do sense of place, rootedness, and adventure shape us?
- How do we build the resolve to move on from one life chapter into the next, cultivating our own personal blend of hesitance and courage, of grief and gratitude?
You can see more of TOP Studio's creations on Instagram @_travelingonpaper_ and @_tracysjournal_ and travelingonpaper.com, launched in 2020.
Maybe you'd like to join me in a little challenge I set for myself. I'm unable to travel these days (for complicated health reasons). Inspired by these TOP Studio tapes — as well as by ZM.Ball's "Echoes of Shanghai" and "Dear Tokyo" — I've decided this spring I'll "travel on paper" in my journal, exploring places I've dreamt of visiting, like Taiwan and Japan.
For reasons noted in my previous blog post, I'm not writing entries on these journal pages, but instead borrowing text from tapes, like {soft ending}, to complement the imagery in collage spreads. I like to imagine that any portion of each page that remains empty, surrounding the decoration, is waiting to be filled in by my future self, with travel notes!
What kinds of stationery satisfy your own unique relationship with travel? Maybe you keep scrapbooks of past trips, filled with favorite memories, sentimental keepsakes, and records of your discoveries. Maybe you've considered creating vision boards filled with places you dream of visiting. Do you have a yearning to explore the great wide world beyond your comfort zone? If you're a homebody (like me!), do you travel on paper? Whatever your preferences, I wish you peaceful journeys and happy adventures in your journal.
