To the magazine publishing team - KUDOS!!

[Howard In Toronto]

WOW!

This month's magazine is a tour de force. KUDOS. KUDOS. And more KUDOS.

Excellent news about professional woodworkers and how they do their thing.

And sensational photos of some excellent NEW design. Not all of it to my taste but way more elevated than usual. None of the usual "same-old-same-old." These contributors really had something to say!

All of the magazine's production people should be proud of your accomplishments and taste level.

Congratulations.

Howard

[Rob Brown]

Glad you are enjoying the latest issue Howard. This was a topic I've wanted to cover for a while. I think it's great for pretty much everyone....whether you're into building projects straight from a magazine, or whether you design a lot of your own furniture, there's something here for everybody.

I'm interested in how others feel about the issue. Love it? Hate it? Feedback, please!

[kevinhanna]

Spending a week at Rosewood in the Chair Design class with Michael Fortune certainly opened my eyes. My type of creativity has always been writing efficient, maintainable and reusable source code. It's something where everything has a reason, and can be justified. Not so with designing furniture. I'd done a couple designs before taking the course, I'm still quite happy with them. But I think I stopped too soon, I didn't try hard enough, because ideas stopped coming to me.

Michael advocates sketching small, the full size, followed by 3-5 quarter scale models, then a mock up using whatever materials will get the job done (styrofoam, 2x lumber, cardboard...). Going through this process forces you to experiment more, giving more opportunity for inspirations. One thing that sticks in my mind is Michael grabbing my quarter scale and asking "Have you considered putting the arms in this angle" followed by the snapping sound of the arms being widened beyond failing point. For a 1/4 of a second I was pissed, but then realized this is part of the process (a few weeks later I had the opportunity to bend one of his chair back slabs too quickly causing it to fail, so I got even ;-). You don't really know unless you try it. I'm convinced my future designs will be better because of having a more thorough design process.

I'd be interested in reading full articles on their process, rather than 1 paragraph for each. Maybe revisit some of these craftsmen dedicating a page or two.

Kevin

[Rob Brown]

Hi Kevin,

I understand what you mean...it would be great to hear about some of those "outside-the-box" furniture artists tackle each step of the design process. Since we are always tight on space, and want to cover as much ground as possible in each issue, there just wasn't enough space to get too far into the details. In fact, to include all those artists, as well as many other just as worthy Canadian artists, and talk about how they design furniture would probably make quite a thick book. And a very interesting one. Anyone have an 'in' with a Canadian book publisher????