The Furniture Design Course (updated 2024) will teach you furniture design and furniture making skills. The course is based on skills developed and used in a fully functioning furniture making studio. Learn from an expert in furniture making and woodworking. Norman Pirollo, woodworker and furniture maker for over 25 years, has work featured and published in magazines and books. 

In this course, furniture design is explored. Good design is essential in a quality furniture piece. Good design minimizes wasted resources and provides a furniture maker with essential feedback and pause when creating furniture. Loosely translated, the design process keeps a maker from rushing into a potentially flawed furniture design. The checks and balances give pause to the process as well as streamlining the build. Develop your own furniture style and aesthetic. Selecting the best woods for a furniture design is critical in the appeal of a furniture piece. 

As with most woodworkers, I was anxious to build furniture early on. With passage of time and several furniture projects later, the anxiety of simply creating work had passed. It was far more important to create a well-designed, striking piece of furniture. So I delved into furniture design, studied with renown furniture makers, and used this knowledge to develop a furniture design process that works. I show you how to select the best woods for your furniture design.

Woodworkers often find the concept of designing their own furniture to be intimidating and outside the realm of their skills. They would rather work from established plans. This course will make you at ease with sketching, drawing and refining a furniture design that both excites and challenges you. Furniture design allows you to exercise your creativity and build a furniture piece that you can truly call your own. You will also be able to work within defined constraints that are specific to the space you need filled, the woods you prefer and incorporate the detail of your choosing.

In the online furniture design course you acquire the skills necessary to design and create your own unique furniture. Learn to develop your own furniture style and aesthetic. You will become familiar with the design language specific to furniture design. The concepts you learn will carry through to every furniture project you tackle. Furniture design will provide you the artistic license to create furniture unique to you, to a style and aesthetic you prefer. Through the design process, you will discover if a furniture piece is visually appealing and what changes can be made. The course features downloadable videos on the following topics:

• Furniture design overview, history of furniture design

• Become familiar with furniture design process

• Understand the design process

• How to sketch and draw your design

• How to refine and flesh out your furniture designs

• Raise your furniture designs to the next level

• How to select wood for a furniture design

• Use scale models, mockups, prototypes to develop a design

• In-depth use of mockups to develop a furniture design

• Develop a furniture style for your furniture designs

• Selecting a furniture style and aesthetic

• Getting proportions right in a furniture design

• Using the dynamic design process in a furniture design

• Use maquettes and prototypes in a furniture design

• Use templates and CAD when designing your furniture

• Wood selection, drawing, mockups, prototypes, CAD

• (2) video lectures on creating a niche & developing furniture to market

• Additional (2 hr.) 3-part live class on Furniture Design

• Additional Display Cabinet (tambour) build (30 min.)

• Knife Hinge Install & Door Overlap

• Completion Certificate

START WOODWORKING
$15 eBook included with purchase of course