I really like products that incorporate wood. One of my friends told me that the Instagram page looks like it is all walnut and leather products. Maybe I should have named the blog Walnut and Leather. Fortunately I like to talk about a wide variety of materials for product design.

Recently walnut has been really popular in product design. I personally like walnut a lot, but really there are a lot of different species of wood that are beautiful. Wood adds more dimension to the design of products. It makes products appear softer and more approachable. It makes them feel real with a high quality. Wood can be used as an accent or as the base material. Unfortunately I really don’t know a lot about other wood species.

Fortunately the guys over at Core77 can help with that. They have spent some time and put together a fantastic series of articles talking about all sorts of different wood species ranging from Hard Maple to Sapele. The series is written with each article focusing on a specific wood species. The first 10 articles are from the Atlanta, Georgia woodworker Rob Wilkey. The articles 10-20+ are written by the woodworker Shannon Rogers. Shannon is best known for his work as the Renaissance Woodworker where he builds exclusively without power tools. I have listened to Shannon on the Wood Talk podcast where he cohosts with Marc Spagnola (The Wood Whisperer) and Matt Cremona. It is a great podcast to listen to if you are interested in woodworking, furniture making, or working in your garage.

The series from Core77 does a really good job explaining and reviewing some of the most common species of wood and talking about some of the common uses for them. As a designer it is always good to have a resource to understand the basics of a material. Wood can be incredibly complex and you can very easily get overwhelmed with all of the knowledge there is on wood. Core77 has built a very handy database to use as the starting point for selecting the perfect species of wood for a design.