Jointly
Jointly is a typeface designed for CNC cut joinery in wood. For as long as wood has been used as a construction material, there has been joinery. From dowel joints of flat pack furniture, to the half-lap of a log cabin, to the exquisite geometry of Japanese traditional joints, and the ever-classic dovetail, joinery says a lot about an object’s purpose, the craftsperson, and about history. But what if the joints could literally say something? Jointly was designed for messages that last, poetry in wood, and allowing furniture to truly speak for the first time.
As I was developing the workflow, the first few tests were designed in Fusion 360 adding all the appropriate radii and spacing for each letter. This workflow was greatly improved by having the full typeface designed ahead of time.
Pictured here is a student in a CNC joinery class at MIT. He was prototyping a box for his child.
Students in my CNC Joinery class at Truro Center for the Arts used Shaper Origin to experiment with Jointly and other self-designed joints.
For production, I set up a fixture on a Shopbot CNC router to hold the boards vertically for cutting the text tenons. Mortises were cut on the same machine, with the boards lying flat in a more typical orientation.
Work in progress, this set of shelves was designed for my brother, Alex. He is an expert potter and asked for a set of shelves for his tea mugs. The poem on the sides was written by my wife, Sadie.
Seen here is the mortises for one side of Alex’s tea mug shelf.
When I asked my wife Sadie to marry me, I did so with a box featuring Jointly.
This was the first test of the concept. Made with Shaper Origin in December 2020, this test joint proved to me this concept was possible.