A Beautifully Illustrated Guide To Making

A light grey background with white and black line drawings of three different bicycles on one page and three different tire levers and three different valve covers for bikes on the other.

If you’ve ever been wondering what you should make next, it can be a daunting task to decide with the firehose of inspiration coming straight from the series of tubes that makeup the World Wide Web. Perhaps a more curated digital catalog of projects would help?

Featuring “1000 Useful Things to Make,” [NODE]’s Make it Yourself is a beautifully-illustrated catalog of open source and DIY projects spanning a number of domains including camping gear, furniture, music, and maker tools. Each image is a link to the original project and there’s a handy icon by each denoting what skills are needed, such as sewing or 3D printing.

If you haven’t seen [NODE]’s work before, he uses line art to illustrate his projects and has given all of these projects the same treatment on the (virtual) page with credits to the original creators in the footnotes. We hope a future edition will include tractors and houses to truly rival the Sears catalog of yore, but it’s hard to complain when we already have so many projects we could choose to build.

Many of the projects may seem familiar, if slightly fancier when illustrated in line art, like the Ploopy headphones, this retro audio player, or the Keybon adaptive macro pad.

12 thoughts on “A Beautifully Illustrated Guide To Making

      1. “He who dies with the most toys, is still dead.”

        My wife told me that a week after my funeral, “it all goes out to the curb, with 25 cent price tags.”

        Or as another Internet denizen said, “The only thing that I fear about death, is missing a great estate sale!”

    1. Toolmaking is a great human traition

      Imagine if the first human hadn’t taken the time off cutting trees, butchering game and whatever else they were doing to sit down and make stone axes, knives and hammers

    1. I was bitching about the cost of women’s swimwear (Sports Illustrated…before ‘dudes with boobs’.)

      Was challenged to make one.
      She wouldn’t even try it on.

      Doing my failure analysis.
      Clear wrap, clear tape and dental floss were bad material choices.

  1. This is beautiful! I love this. I was tempted to print it just to leaf through it. What a joy. I can imagine the effort to create this. I’d love for you to update this curated selection of desirable things. I share your love of simple crisp line drawings!

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