Practical Design Solutions and Strategies: Key Advice for Sound Construction from Fww

Taunton Press has two collections of articles on woodworking design in publication. As the title indicated, this collection focuses in the practical issues of furniture design, primarily to do with construction decisions. Speaking as someone who has occasionally 'created' himself into a corner, this is important material. After all, it never hurts to have a good grasp of what it really is going to take to make an interesting idea into a good piece of furniture. Well illustrated and lucidly presented the six sections are Conceiving Your Projects, Organizing Your Projects, Engineering Furniture to Last, Construction Options for Tables, Construction Options for Cabinets, and Construction Options for Chairs. Each section contains articles of considerable interest. The detailing on table construction and the two articles on chair making are particularly interesting. Both focus on the 'holistic' factors of the project rather than simply covering joinery. By fitting into the niche that sees design and construction as a process, the reader will come to see how each decision effects the final outcome. This means that what you see in your imagination is more likely to appear in front of you as finished work. While this is not a volume for beginners, taking the time to go through this book and understand the principals will keep you out of trouble and increase your satisfaction with the final product.

The furniture in this book isn't just built to last. It's built to win. As in, if you hit it with a car, the furniture will win. Or if you drop it out of a window onto the sidewalk, the furniture will win.You don't have to build everything the way they do. I'm about to make some end tables with drawers, and I'm not going to use dovetails and haunched tenons. I'm going to use dowels. But the important thing is that I now know the right way to do it, and I know my way will at least work, and I know why some other designs won't work. I won't blindly follow plans or make design compromises out of ignorance. And one day soon, I'll make something the right way.I knocked a star off of the rating because the book is an anthology of previously-published material and kind of a broad-ranging hodgepodge. But it is an excellent hodgepodge nonetheless.I think books like this should be read not just by people who aim to build furniture but by anyone who uses furniture.

I would not recommend this book to a complete beginner. There are more important books that should be read first (like Tage Frid's books and Taunton Press' "Basics of Craftmanship"). However, assuming that you have a bit of background and experience in woodworking this book is a great way to build your skills in designing great furniture or cabinetry as well as confronting the occasional design decision that creeps into "cook-book" projects.Since this book is compiled from articles from Fine Woodworking Magazine there is a great breadth of topics and each topic that is covered is explored in depth. However, there are still a great deal of design related topics that are not touched upon. Make no mistake, this is not a textbook of furniture/cabinetry design. It is a collection of design focused magazine articles. Infact, some of the articles aren't even that focused on design. If you want to focus on design and design alone, this isn't the book for you.Some of the articles are better written than others, although all are well written and applicable to pretty much any woodworker. The way the articles are grouped together is sometimes baffling, but if you just treat this as a thick magazine with no advertising and no fluff, you'll be impressed.This is a great read and an important book to have in your woodworking library. As a woodworker that builds "stuff", you won't be able to avoid design decisions, and this book is a great way of getting your feet wet and stepping away from the complete construction plans you see in every woodworking magazine.

This book contains a myriad of solutions to common furntiure design and construction problems. It presents design examples rather than full plans for projects but that's good because the examples show a variety of ways to approach various elements of the design of doors, cabinets, tables and chairs. I like this approach because it will help me build a vocabulary of options when I design my own projects or want to replicate furniture I only have pictures of and can't inspect.My only complaint is that this is a collection of articles from back issues of Fine Woodworking magazine that wasn't well edited before being published in the book. It contains several editorial errors such as referring to figures by position on a page when they don't have that position in the book format, deleting a list of suppliers that's referenced in an article and at least one case where I suspect that the captions have been reversed under two pictures. The editors should have been more careful!I originally read a copy borrowed from the library but I will be buying a copy soon to keep around for reference.

This book is great. There is lots of information on how to design furniture. It is amazingly easy to read for such an informative book. The illustrations are excellent.This book doesn't just give you one way to do things. It shows multiple ways and the pros and cons of each method.If you want to know more about how to build a chair, table, add drawers to a table or more, get this book.