People talk alot about forging technique, but what about tips for designing a piece?

For now lets try and keep it to traditional type joinery, but in either a contemporary design or traditonal.

To me design is the hardes part. you have to start from an idea and put it to paper draw it and draw it agine till you get it looking some what to what you want. figure all your conecting points and how they will conect eather rivit, tenon, coler or weld be it forge or arc. then make test pice to see if its really what you want and if the idea is going to work. allot of times after making a test peice you will find that making it a diffrent way is allot easeyer than what you originaly had in mind. remember blacksmiths dont make mistakes we just change the design

Rbrown, lol... I like that "we don't make mistakes we just change the design"

Try coming up with ideas at night.

Try coming up with ideas at night.

good luck trying to sleep if you come up with one you like.

I draw 3 or 4 designs a day. I look at other peices to get ideas for the design then I draw it on paper. I make improvmets on the design then eventually, I make the peice.

For me, just fooling around at the forge really hepls me get out ideas. Ocationaly I'll sit down and do a formal drawing, when this happens its usualy based off of something. Either an element from what will be the finished piece, for example the shape of a certain twist, or the form of a scroll. Or I'll base it off of an organic object, a leaf, the shape of a tree trunk. These designs from nature are a lot of fun, because of the free form nature of them. But for any design it usualy takes me turning it around in my head.

I like to design by muddle - as in muddle through it. I'll get an idea and start forging. Then I keep messing with it or make another version until I get something I like. My drawing skills are exceptionly bad so I only do crude stratching to help me remember ideas. When I meet with customers I tell them I'm paper and pencil challenged. I will make them a sample (or show them something I already have) so they can see and feel the texture I want to use on their item. This works out great and I'm building a nice sample "library".

I usually start out with a scaled down drawing of whatever I want to build. Whether it is a knife or a larger more completed piece the design starts out the same way. When I get the dimensions where I want them I will draw out the piece full scale on a chalk board or if it is very large on the concrete floor. Then I start forging using the full scale drawing to form the pieces. I bought a bucket of

I love what Julius Schram says about design. (I will paraphrase so that I don't waste all evening looking for the quote:-) That the design should flow from the technique used to excute the project. That the technique should not be hidden or masked, but should be honestly and proudly displayed in the finished product, and encorperated into the design. Riveting and piercing, should be boldy used in the design, as well as forge welding.

I like designs that you cannot fabricate, I want my work to look different from that of cheap fabricated stuff you can buy at Walmart. Cross section transitions tapered end and proper finals. I look at what techniques I want to use and what I am trying to build and look for ways to incorperate them. The form dictate the shape and the techniques suggest the way to embellish the design. Then there are all the historic design motiff and shapes that can be used, a vocabulary in iron so to speak. I am only constrained by my desire to forge my shapes, and file my contours, and a dislike of modern design and fabrication techniques...

Design = a happy medium between too much which makes it look garish and tacky and too little which makes it look incomplete and poorly done.

I'm a big believer in not having to sacrifice function for form. The form should come from how the piece was creatively designed to be as functional as possible. What is the piece's reason for existence if it does not function?

Have a look at the door pulls that Dief posted. Very simple in design but elegant looking when installed. Sometimes design does not necessarily need to be complicated.
Left brain thinking can be diffucult for some people. The left side of the brain is the creative side and the right side of the brain is the logical "math" side. Maybe just fooling around at the forge, as mentioned in a previous post in this thread, you can stumble across something that you can use as a basis for soemthing else. Another thing you can do is doodle. Get some paper and a pencil - erasers are not allowed here - and just let your hand draw lines and go from there. You can draw an object if you wish but part of the doodling exercise is to just let your left brain have a chance to express itself. Nothing you do is wrong. All part of the process.
After a while the left brain can be creative and the right brain can see the prctical application of what the left brain is designing. Or it can happen the other way around as well.

Brian
Ottawa