On Design · 07. October 2025

There has been a number of times over my time in yacht design where I have had to reflect on my decision making and in some cases completely revise some aspect of my thinking that I had long held to be true and unquestionable. It’s important not to hold too tightly to ideas and concepts what is true today may not be true tomorrow. And it may not even have been true in the first place. The following passage from Bruno Munaris’ Design as Art” sums it up eloquently.

On Design · 05. October 2025

Hot Bertaa kettle was in production for seven years until its Italian design company Alessi withdrew it from their range of designer kitchenware with Alberto Alessi referring to the design as “our most beautiful fiasco”. Well designed objects incorporate both utility and art but too much emphasis on one or the other increases the risk of product failure from too much emphasis on one side or the other. Does it matter that Starck's efforts at boiling water with a sense of panache came to...

On Design · 03. October 2025

Ever get the feeling that a lot of modern boats are just plain plain? Devoid of an individual persona and devoid of emotional impact? Are our marinas populated with flotillas of plastic tubs with little to distinguish them from each other in terms of style or personality The motor vehicle industry is doing a bit of soul searching on this topic. According to Rob Dolton writing in Car Design News the recent IAA 2025 (International Automobile Exhibition) in Munich has been framed as the great...

On Design · 02. September 2025

Complexity and over dependance on technology can be a curse on a yacht, especially if it’s technology you depend on in a critical situation and you don’t have the resources to fix or override the technology in question. We used to mount our dagger boards in foil shaped cases with the board bearing against the inside of the case. This resulted in the risk of the board jamming in the case and being difficult to raise. Now we use rectangular cases with foil shaped bearings to minimize the...

On Design · 01. January 2025

Steven Pinker in his book The Sense of Style writes; “A coherent text is a designed, and ordered tree of sections within sections criss crossed by arcs that track topics, points, actors and themes, and held together by connections that tie one proposition to the next. Like other designed objects it comes about not by accident but by drafting a blueprint, attending to details and maintaining a sense of harmony and balance.” Pinkers' description of the process of writing is both succinct and...