Mark (TheCraftsmansPath.com) on November 8th, 2008

Blackburn’s third pillar of design which complements both Function and Construction is Proportion.  The topic of proportion is something that I have written about here before.  So, I won’t repeat too much of that information in this post but rather, I will touch on some additional design paradigms that are useful in developing proportion in [...]

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Mark (TheCraftsmansPath.com) on October 8th, 2008

Building on the first post in this series, it’s time to explore Graham Blackburn’s second pillar of design: Construction.  When one thinks of construction in woodworking, the first thought is inevitably joinery.  While joinery is definitely one element of the construction of a piece of furniture, as you might expect, there’s more to the equation.
Construction
From [...]

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Mark (TheCraftsmansPath.com) on September 27th, 2008

Building on the information that I gleaned from the Graham Blackburn workshop that I attended, I wanted to go into a little more depth on the topics of design that were discussed.  Very often when woodworkers think about designing a piece of furniture they only think about things like joinery, style and the finish of [...]

Continue reading about Three Pillars of Design: Part 1 Function

Mark (TheCraftsmansPath.com) on July 21st, 2008

Recently, I was watching Neil Lamens’ interview (Part 1 and Part 2) with Wendell Castle. Neil did a great job talking with Mr. Castle about his approach to the craft and art of woodworking and his approach to design. If you have not seen the interview, I’d urge you to give it a [...]

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Mark (TheCraftsmansPath.com) on June 10th, 2008

I was reading a recent post at Chuck Bender’s new blog about the differences that make one piece of furniture good and another one great. Two quotes in Chuck’s excellent post were particularly interesting to me:
“…there is nothing new under the sun…” and “…if a piece is meticulously crafted but is lacking in [...]

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