← Home
Padalka Guitars · Education

Design Lab

Not how to build a guitar. How to design one worth building.

Ennea-H SN236, a headless bass: carved, beveled ash edges framing a deep red and black body

You can already build. Tight tolerances, no fret buzz, a finish that isn't peeling off after a year: that part is solved. What's left is developing a recognizable design language.

Most builders inherit a shape and adjust it. Move a horn, deepen a cutaway, redraw the headstock. It's honest work and it fills your portfolio. The design still isn't yours. So you're left with quality, which is no longer a factor, or price, which you can only lower so much. The builders you can name by their outline started from a problem instead. Teuffel pulled the guitar apart into its working parts and gave each one its own place. Even the tonewood sits off to the side. That's the Birdfish. Klein spent many years on where a guitar should contact a seated body. That first move is a different kind of work.

This is that work, taught as a discipline: how a functional constraint turns into an aesthetic decision, and how composition behaves on a carved surface rather than on paper. Not a style to copy. A method you run again on the next instrument.

Ten weeks. Five people. You finish with one instrument designed from the brief up.

It's for you if
  • You build. Not necessarily for a living, but you make the whole instrument.
  • Your guitars play well and you still can't say why they look the way they do.
  • You want a method, not a shape to trace.
It isn't if
  • You play and don't build.
  • You're after construction technique. Nothing here covers joinery, fretwork or setup.
  • You want templates.
What you get
  1. 01Nine illustrated sheets, one a week, yours to keep.
  2. 02Ten live sessions, recorded for your cohort.
  3. 03Your hand-ins discussed live, in the session that week.
  4. 04A mid-project check-in and a final presentation.
  5. 05Four other builders in the room.
  6. 06Everything stays open to you afterwards.
The sheets

The first four weeks build the vocabulary. The next three put it on one instrument. Week 8 is about turning one instrument into a body of work, then two weeks on a final project.

Module 1Design Fundamentals

  1. 01The Design MethodologyWeek 1
  2. 02Visual Language FoundationsWeek 2
  3. 03Color Theory and Three-Dimensional DesignWeek 3
  4. 04Design Styles and Historical ContextWeek 4

Module 2Applied Design

  1. 05Design Archetypes and Shape GenerationWeek 5
  2. 06Color, Material, and Finish StrategyWeek 6
  3. 07Design Integration and CritiqueWeek 7

Module 3Professional Practice

  1. 08Design Language and Brand IdentityWeek 8

Final project

  1. 09Complete Design DevelopmentWeeks 9–10

Cohort 2026-NOV. Five seats. Starts Monday, November 2. Live sessions on Sundays at 10am Saskatoon time.

Price & enrollment