THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
(Left and opposite) Stephanie Gilmore can draw gorgeous lines on boards from any era, but lately her surfboard designer, Darren Handley, has been working with futuristic blends of polyurethane and expanded polystyrene foams.
“Designing surfboards is so easy,” I thought aloud, sitting in the glow of a mammoth computer monitor with beer in hand, watching a colorful 3-D rendering of my next surfboard come together before my eyes. There was no paper with dimensions and templates scribbled out in pencil. No foam dust. I wasn’t in a shaping bay at all, actually, but a tastefully appointed San Francisco apartment, with the sound of streetcars trundling by in the distance. I spent 10 or so minutes clicking around with a mouse, altering the board’s template by pulling in the tail here, widening the nose there, drawing deep and totally non-hydrodynamic channels and contours through the bottom of the board. I made the rails too thin, then too thick, and obliterated any sense of proper curve in the rocker. Julian Hoenig, who sat next to me, was annoyed, I’m sure. He’s an actual designer, who, in addition to his day job creating impossibly cool gadgets for Apple, also runs a surfboard business, selling boards of his own design.
“That depends,” Hoenig said. “Do you want the board to actually work? Designing bad boards is really easy. Making the good ones is the hard part.”
Hoenig explained that while it’s plenty easy for a schlub like myself to tweak an existing template, designing the template and understanding the physics at play was the important part. Screwing with the board’s dims on a screen didn’t make me a designer.
I reluctantly relinquished control of the mouse to Hoenig and he finished fleshing out my board (a sort of teardrop-shaped, eggy 5'11"). We settled on the final dimensions and color, finished our beers, and shook hands on a newly ordered board.
A former Audi and Lamborghini designer, Hoenig’s sketched out the shapes for lots of high-cost and high-performance products, all of which have a whole lot more moving parts than a surfboard. He showed me some models he’s kept over the years of cars he’d designed—beautiful, miniature super-cars that were so complicated, no manner of software will
