Woodworker's Journal 2011-35-1, страница 30

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Three Tenets of Good Design

By Ian Kirby

Teaching woodworkers to design their own projects is a complicated and daunting task. To start the process, our author focuses on the three most important aspects of design: proportion, proportion and proportion!

Proportions of the Site: A wall-hung bookcase's proportion is a part of a larger site. Its task in this case is to hold the author's cookbooks of a certain size, which affects its proportions as well.

Furniture can be made of many different materials. All furniture, wooden included, can be divided into two broad groups, generally referred to as case goods and stick furniture. Case goods are those things which have doors

and drawers furniture is tables and chairs.

storage furniture. Stick

The difference between them visually is that case goods present us with a solid cuboid object. Tables and chairs are made up of legs and rails that have spaces between them. It is a difference that brings considerable complexities, each of its own kind.

To help put this admittedly difficult topic

of design into a practical context, Ihe piece I'm going to use as an example is a wall-hung open bookcase. Headers who have been with the Journal for a while will perhaps recognize it from the October 2007 issue. It falls nicely between the cracks of these two broad groups because it's not a closed box, but neither has it any parts that enclose an open space.

This piece also raises a difference between the projects that you make as a furniture maker and bought furniture. Your work, in all but rare instances, is site specific, which means that it is composed and made for a room Dr a particular place in a room where it will live. It is often subject specific as well, meaning that you are making a piece not only for a specific location but also a specific use in that location.

So it is with this bookcase. It's both site and subject specific since it is adjacent to the kitchen and intended for cookbooks of mostly large and medium size.

The Primary Consideration

Regardless of all other visual considerations, one is paramount — a first principle of furniture design, if you will. And that is proportion. It is the single most important aspect of any piece of furniture to which you should pay attention. To parody the mantra of real estate agents, furniture is about proportion, proportion, proportion.

That doesn't mean there is anything absolute about proportion. What it does mean is that every set of major dimensions, as well as every detail, has to be considered in the context of proportion.

You may well ask, "explain proportion." The easy and countable explanation is that it is a quantity of something that is part of a whole amount or number. Less simple is the uncountable explanation that it is the relation of one part to another or the whole with respect to magnitude or

30 February 2011 Woodworker $ Journal

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