Where to get design ideas

Design ideas are everywhere, but you have to look at them not as a woodworker who wants to figure out how to build each one, but rather as a palette of shapes and forms that you find pleasing to your eye. When looking for design ideas, I make extensive use of the Internet, particularly google and google images. If I query google with something like: “ greene and greene entertainment center” it will return numerous sites that sell furniture over the Internet. Most have images I can click on to get a larger image, and when I find something I like, it is very easy to save that image to my computer. I catalog these images on my Mac using a program called MacJournal. After a few sessions online, I can easily accumulate 20 or 30 design ideas. I also try to capture the dimensions from the web site since that could be helpful later if I attempt to design my own piece loosely based on a particular image.


This is a picture of a Greene and Greene entertainment center I found on Fine Woodworking’s web site made by Andrew Drake. There is a lot to like about this design. First, I think he got the proportions perfect. There is wonderful symmetry both from right to left and from top to bottom. The curved doors are complemented by the curve in the bottom rail. The three drawers in the center occupy slightly less than 1/3 of the interior space, yet give the overall feeling of balance. Most importantly, an important design paradigm is for form to always follow function. You start with function, what the piece is supposed to do, then design the form to achieve the function, yet still be pleasing. I think Andrew Drake has achieved this goal.

Although I’ve found so much to like in Drake’s design, I don’t want to want to reproduce his piece exactly. I do want to use Drake’s design as a kind of design template, however. A “design template” is a kind of bounding box inside which I will place my own design. The basic shape and proportions become something akin to an artist’s canvass. The details inside that bounding box represent the changes I will make to incorporate my own design ideas.

Mahogany Entertainment Center

I’ve decided to join the “blogging” generation so I can record and share my thoughts as work through various woodworking projects. I’ve had my own web site http://www.larryciesla.com for several years and have written extensive articles describing my past projects. But these were always done “after the fact,” months after the project was actually completed. I’ve decided to try to document my entertainment center project differently this time. I want to use my blog posts as a way to force myself to create journal entries as I actually work on the project in the shop. My Mahogany Entertainment Center project is perfect for this because I’m at the beginning of the project and have yet to do the actual design or any woodworking. I anticipate this project will likely take five or six months from the time I make my first mark on my full size drawing until the day I move the finished piece to its new home under my 70” Sharp Aquos TV.

I actually have done some work on this project up to now, but it has been limited to researching the furniture style I want to build in. I’m one of those woodworkers who freely admits that I’m not a “furniture designer” although I do design furniture. My approach to furniture design is to be very pragmatic about what I am and am not good at. I also recognize that certain furniture designers have created their own recognizable style, and for someone like me, choosing a particular (well known) style is a great place to start. I’ve always admired furniture in the Greene and Greene style. I love the use of ebony accents to hide screw holes, or the cloud lift features that often characterize a Greene and Greene piece of furniture. Such furniture is most often made from mahogany and ebony. In particular, most often the mahogany chosen was from South America, which unfortunately, has become very scarce and very expensive. I’ve found a source for purchasing South American mahogany at Owl Hardwood in Lombard, Illinois, and recently purchased a few boards to use to help me work out the finishing schedule. Naturally I’ll try to document how I go about determining exactly how I will be finishing this piece. One of the lessons I’ve learned over my woodworking years is that figuring out exactly how you will be finishing a project should be the first thing you do, not the last!

I expect the construction of this entertainment center to be relatively straightforward, but I do anticipate at least a few interesting problems to have to solve. For me, that is what attracts me to building furniture - solving problems, figuring out how to execute a particular joint, or how to achieve a particular finished look. I’ll try to focus my blog entries on some of the more difficult aspects of building this piece, but will also describe the more common aspects. I hope the content I provide will be interesting to both novice as well as advanced woodworkers.