Best Of Kansas City

The scene on our cover was created by 34-year-old Kansas Citian Matt Hawkins. A Shawnee Mission North High School grad, Hawkins went on to work at Hallmark, where he eventually got bored and started building toys out of paper. These days, he works at C-3, an Overland Park company that designs kids' meal toys for national restaurants, and he has freelanced for Disney. A new book, Urban Paper, collects work by Hawkins and other paper artists. Marking its publication is a First Friday party October 2 at the Scion Lab (on Oak between 18th and 19th streets).

We wondered whether, after designing the paper-robot Pitch box (download a pattern to build your own at pitch.com), Hawkins had grown tired of seeing the red dispensers around town. Nope.

"Actually, I'd like to see them get up and walk -- that would be awesome," he says. "They could hand you a paper as you walked up. I think you guys should work on that."

Maybe in the future, Matt.