Welcome to The Pitch‘s Best Of Kansas City 2009: We love Matt Hawkins

%{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”57150c4389121ca96b960c09″ data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%

The scene on the cover of this year’s Best of Kansas City issue was created by 34-year-old 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. He celebrates its publication with a First Friday party this week at the Scion Lab (on Oak between 18th and 19th streets).

We wondered whether, after designing the paper-robot Pitch box, Hawkins had grown tired of seeing the red dispensers around town.