There’s a pivotal transition that exists on a woodworker’s journey - when they begin to develop their own style.

Their designs begin to support a cohesive theme. Their work becomes differentiated by quality, elegance, and unique features only attributable to them.

When that milestone is reached, technical mastery and refined taste combines to produce work infused with personality – work that cuts through the noise and reveals it’s maker.

So how do you get there? How do you reach the point where someone interacts with your work, admires it, and immediately knows who it was made by?

This post marks the beginning of a series documenting my attempt to answer that question by developing a collection of signature furniture designs.

I’ll be sharing the full process – the goals, the sketches, missteps, revisions, and hard decisions – not as a polished highlight reel, but as an honest record of the challenges along the way.

My hope is that by laying it out in real time, other woodworkers who feel the pull towards original design can learn from my mistakes, borrow what works, and avoid a few of the pitfalls I’m bound to encounter.

In this first post, I’ll document my process for setting goals, defining the scope, and developing early designs sketches for a signature furniture line.

Let’s begin by defining what it is I’m trying to achieve.

 

 

Getting Clear on Goals

I first had to define what success would look like for a signature furniture collection. Did it mean producing designs that would be so good I’d never want to change them? No.

I had to accept something uncomfortable: these designs might not be timeless. They might not even survive five years. However, this framing helped to lower the barrier to entry, because the idea of having to create designs that would endure time and evolution of my craft was debilitating. If these designs do stand the test of time, awesome, but I wasn’t going to make that a requirement.

After hours of rumination, I jotted down the following criterion for success:

A common theme

The pieces should feel like siblings – different personalities, same family values.

 Every part serves a purpose.

Simplicity should come first. Introduce complexity only when necessary.

A Clear Focal Point

Emphasize design details with intention so your eye knows immediately where to go.

Scalable Designs

Can be made bigger/smaller to suit a space, without losing proportions or design aesthetic.

Once I was clear on what the goals were, it was time to decide what kinds of furniture I wanted to target.

 

Defining the Scope

Developing just one furniture design can be time-consuming; development of an entire collection was bound to be a significant endeavor. But honestly that’s why this appealed to me so much – I wanted a passion project that I could really become immersed in.

I had to make sure that the scope was large enough to be considered a “collection” but small enough so that I could devote enough time to developing each design without it feeling like an assembly line of designs.

So how did I narrow down the unlimited options?

I started with the question of interior vs. exterior furniture. I wanted to focus on interior. Mother nature is beautiful, but absolutely ruthless. Check.

Commercial or residential? I chose residential. More personal, more intimate, and can become a generational heirloom. Check.

I then had to decide what aspects of interior furniture I wanted to focus on. I could choose a major piece from every room in a home, or I could focus exclusively on a particular room, such as living room furniture.

I realized something important during this step: some people are likely to be more emotionally attached to certain items in their home than others. Maybe those pieces are associated with a personal passion or they enhance a communal space in the home where they’ve built fond memories with friends and family.

Another consideration was that, because hand-made furniture is an investment and thus unlikely that someone will furnish their entire home with heirloom furniture, some might opt to choose a hand-made piece that lives in a common area of the house and therefore can be seen, interacted with, and appreciated by visitors.

Here are the pieces that ultimately made the cut and why I thought they deserved a place in the collection:

• Dining table:  Family dinners, hosting friends, holidays. This is where relationships are built and memories are made. Bonding over meals is a timeless tradition.
• Coffee table:  The ultimate platform for good conversations over coffee or whiskey. A place where visitors can feel welcome.
• Desk:  A place to do focused, meaningful work. A piece that bolsters the owner’s passion for their career or other academic pursuits.
• Bookcase:  A place for an avid reader to store, display, and share their collection with others.
• Lounge Chair:  A place to relax, recharge, converse, reflect, read, write. A one-stop shop for well-being.
• Media Console:  A modern living room focal point. A place to connect through movies, sports and music, and to house the VHS tapes even though the VHS player broke 16 years ago.

With the scope of work now defined, the time came to put pencil to paper and begin the process of concept design.

 

Early Designs: The Power of Garbage

The time had come to finally start sketching out concept designs for the six pieces that would make up the collection – a daunting task. Where the hell do I start?

My initial thought was to try to define the core theme (Goal # 1) of the collection first so that I could design the individual pieces around that structure, but I was afraid that this would unnecessarily stifle my creativity and limit the flow of ideas, so I scrapped that idea.

Knowing how important maintaining progress and momentum was to the success of the project, I decided to just get first draft sketches of each piece complete, one piece at a time. They didn’t need to be related yet; they just needed to exist on paper. Existence before excellence. This turned a daunting task into a very digestible chunk.

Example task: Draw a sketch of a dining table by the end of the week.

That simple. There were no other rules. The first drafts were likely to be garbage and that was okay, because I knew I would at least have something to iterate on.

Once I had rough concepts of each piece that I was happy (enough) with, I started to think about underlying design themes of the collection. Each piece needed its own unique punch, but the collection also needed some core design elements that would be felt universally.

I immediately thought of designers like the late George Nakashima for inspiration. His designs specialized in using entire slabs of wood and he kept simplicity and utility at the forefront. The result was furniture that was unique, timeless, cohesive, and instantly recognizable by anyone in the craft.

Nakashima possessed a deep reverence for natural materials. He felt cutting a full slab into small piece parts did a severe injustice to the tree. As a result, his work consistently showcased the beauty and the grandeur of the trees from which the wood came.

When something is “Nakashima inspired”, we can visualize what that means. This is what I wanted to achieve.

This is the stage I’m currently in. The process is rife with revisions and uncertainty. Self-doubt creeps in as I question my taste, my ability to design, and the fear that I am just regurgitating what has already been done by more capable people.

But I start to realize that this self-doubt has some utility.

 

Using Self-Doubt as a Tool

Self-doubt does not serve you when you allow it to crush your confidence and prevent action. However, it can enhance your work if you use it as a motivator and a metric for change.

The difference is agency.

In his book The Creative Act, music producer Rick Rubin explains that the fear of not being good enough can be used to push boundaries. He suggests that doubt, properly harnessed, becomes refinement.  

On many occasions during this early design process, I looked at sketches, concluded that I didn’t like them, but it wasn’t clear why. Maybe the proportions weren’t pleasing, or the design was too busy, or maybe it was just too cookie-cutter to really stand out.

For example, one of the early sketches of the bookcase design featured a base with tapered legs where the legs extended up past the cabinet it supported. It looks striking from the front view, giving a feeling of integration between the base and the cabinet, but when viewed from the side, it was awkward and blocky. I didn’t know how to remedy it.

In situations where the solution wasn’t clear, my only option was to experiment. Add something, remove something, make a change to a specific feature, and pay attention to how my feeling about the design changed.

Do I like it more or less now? If less, revert back and try something else. If more, keep following that trail because I might be onto something.

This is a fantastic way to explore and develop taste, and self-doubt is a valuable tool to help do so.

 

What’s Next?

In the next post, I’ll share results and lessons learned from the concept design phase including what core themes I uncovered, and design tactics I found useful.

I’ll also lay out the plan for next steps, such as turning the sketches into 3D models and some potential prototyping.

Thanks for following along. The sketches are rough. The themes are emerging. The doubt is present, which tells me I’m right where I need to be.