Design by Drawing & Building
Draw what looks best to you, then build a full-size sample in wood. Look at it in room light, to see how the shadows fall. It’ll probably look good, but if you don’t like the effect, it’s easy to experiment and revise to make the composition harmonious.
Frame edge A simple molding or chamfer makes a band of light and shadow. Fielding The broad bevel catches light, and also shows a different grain pattern top and bottom. Make it equal to the rail, or wider or narrower, according to taste. Raising A small rabbet, sawn or routed, makes a line of light and shadow. Double raising adds another shadow line.
When you specify the dimensions of a frame-and-panel door, you create a composition of lines, rectangles and planes. It’s harmonious because it follows the architecture of the rails and stiles. Even an arch-top door is symmetrical about a center line. To study different proportions and details, draw frame-and-panel doors full-size.
Chamfered Edge, Mitered Shoulder A chamfer creates a simple band of light or shadow. Try sawing or planing a steep chamfer, 12 to 15 degrees. Any inside edge molding can be mitered by cutting back the shoulder line on the stile to the inside edge of the molding.
Routed Edge, Coped Joint A complex routed edge makes lots of lines and shadows. A matched set of router bits cuts both parts. Any frame molding can be coped by cutting back the rail shoulder so it fits over the molding on the stile. The coped joint has no tolerance for miscut parts or warped and twisted wood.
Solving Problems Coped joints with one locating shoulder and soft curves can tolerate sloppy manufacturing and wood variation. A soft molding makes soft highlights and diffuses shadows. Coping a chamfer leaves a fragile feather edge. It’s better to miter chamfers.
Flat Panels
Shadow Lines The tongue around the flat panel makes a deep shadow line. To change the width of the shadow, change the length of the tongue. To reveal more of the frame edge, shift the panel toward the back. The tongue can be as thin as 1/8".
Narrow Boards To get the most out of narrow boards, make flat panels and add a muntin. Visually, the muntin is enough — you don’t need to raise the panels, too. Make the frame using grooves and stub tenons, and rabbet the panels. With no corners to fit and no panels to glue up, these doors are quick to make.
Muntins A muntin divides the frame to fit narrow panels. The muntin can be held between the rails, or it can follow the form of the stiles. For a different look, divide the door into small panels with rails and muntins. Proportion the muntins to suit the frame.
Fielded on Two Sides
No Shadow Lines Raising and fielding two sides of the panel, instead of all four, simplifies how it looks and how it’s made. To avoid a shadow line top and bottom, size the panel’s tongue to fit the groove in the frame and make the front surfaces almost flush. The telling detail is the little diagonal line where the bevel crosses the inside edge of the frame.
Fielded on Two Sides
Double-raising
Centered Muntin
Narrow Boards To use narrow boards, add a centered muntin. The double-raised effect of two small rabbets also enriches the composition. These details are easy to saw and rout.
Wide Boards An overlay panel gets the most out of wide, highly figured boards. There is no raising or fielding to disrupt the patterns in the wood. Because the panel stands proud of the frame, it casts dramatic shadow lines. Visually, the panel comes forward, while the frame recedes into the background.	Edge Details Grooves retain the overlay panel in its frame. To highlight the edge of the panel, chamfer it, or scratch a little bead.
Multiple Panels To enrich the composition, and to get the best out of ordinary wood, divide the overlay panel into a number of smaller ones. This is another way to make wide doors using narrow wood.

Part I: Proportion and Detail Basics

Frame-and-panel doors nearly always look pretty good. The reason is that harmony automatically results from the construction: as you can see in the drawings, all the lines follow the architecture of the frame. Nevertheless, if you build without paying attention to proportions and details, while the door might not run all the way to ugly, it probably won’t look its best. There are many small decisions to be made, and getting them right is what makes a door really pleasing to the eye.

Why Frame-and-Panel?

Let’s begin by looking at the reasons why we use the frame-and-panel. It’s our time-honored solution to the fact that solid wood changes in width and thickness in response to moisture in the air. By making a frame out of narrow pieces of wood, the wide panel trapped in a groove inside the frame is free to expand and contract. A broad beveled edge — called the field — disguises the movement and thins the panel to fit its groove. This system is very old, and people are totally comfortable with how it looks. When we make doors of plywood or MDF, materials that don’t shrink or expand, we often rout out shapes that imitate solid-wood frames with panels.

Raised and fielded all around isn’t the only good solution. You can get the same benefits from a panel that’s fielded on two sides only, a flat panel, or an overlay panel. And by adding muntins, you can make panels with any width wood.

When you want to design a door, you actually face two sets of decisions: how is it going to look, and how is it going to be made. Although techniques affect appearance, it’s a mistake to allow technique to take over. When that happens, everything comes out looking the same. You need to be able to make whatever you design, which usually means choosing or modifying your techniques to suit your design decisions. It’s worthwhile not only to explore all of the alternatives made possible by techniques you know, but also to look for new techniques because they will open up more design possibilities.

For example, compare making a door with a cope and stick router bit set plus a panel-raising bit, to making it with the table saw. The bit set creates enough of a joint to hold the frame together; it makes matching grooves for the panel, and it molds the inside edge of the frame. Its companion panel-raising bit forms the field and the tongue that fits the groove in the frame, and might also mold the raised portion of the panel. This tooling gets the whole job done. The trouble is, big door or little door, you can’t adjust anything. For all their advantages, router bit sets take control of how the door looks. The table saw, on the other hand, can shape any size groove, rebate, and chamfer, and is easily jigged to saw fields up to 2-7⁄8" wide. Such details as beads, roundovers and coves can be routed after shaping on the saw. Shop-jigged techniques like these require more know-how than bit sets, but they give you control of dimensions, proportions and details.

Design and Technique

Design is the process of achieving a good-looking result within realistic limitations. The available technology is one kind of limitation. Two more are function and form — the cabinet has to close, so it needs doors; the cabinet is this big, so the doors have to fit. But the foundation under every design problem is neither form nor function. It’s economics, which in woodworking means getting the best out of the wood and tools you’ve got and tools you’ve got. Of course, it would be nice to buy some spectacular wide planks for panels, but what about the stash of beautiful 6" boards you’ve been storing for longer than you care to admit?

One way to make a panel out of narrow boards is to glue up the width you need, but maybe the figure makes a lousy edge-to-edge match, or maybe there still isn’t enough width, so you add a narrow strip, and now the figure and color don’t match: a real distraction. A better alternative is to build door frames with a dividing strip, called a muntin, as shown in the sketches on this page. Although muntins typically tenon into the rails, there’s no technical reason why this has to be. They can be cut the same length as the stiles with short rails in between, a small technical change that can have a large effect on appearance.

Making a muntin is no more difficult than gluing up a panel, plus it hands you another design choice: to raise or not to raise. While a raised panel is traditional, it’s not the only solution. With narrow pieces of reasonably dry wood going into a modern interior, movement is not such a big issue, so a flat panel is another good alternative.

Retain the flat panel by its rabbeted edge. The width of the rabbet and the location of the frame groove give you control over the shadow lines. If you want less shadow, move the panel groove closer to the front of the frame. For a deep, dramatic shadow, move the groove toward the back.

Light and Shadow

To work out proportions and frame details, draw the door in front elevation, full-size. The drawing shows you a lot, but it can’t portray the effect of light and shadow on the different levels of frame and panel. In the real world, you don’t see in elevation view. You always see in perspective and it changes as you move or as the door opens and closes. What you see also depends on the light you see it in. The only way to assess the effect of light and shadow is to build a full-size mock-up and look at it in the room.

If it looks terrific, great: build the doors. However, if your mock-ups aren’t as dramatic as you expected, the reason is likely to be depth, or the lack of it. Increasing visual depth makes stronger shadows. You can do it in a number of ways: enlarge the molding, move the panel backward in the frame, change the width of the raising or, on a flat panel, change the width of the rabbet.

You’ll soon notice that, from most viewing distances, all you see of any molded profile is light and shadow, and simple profiles often work best. A chamfer or a little rabbet doesn’t seem like much of a molding, but it makes a sharp line of light. Until you get quite close to them, complex profiles look about the same as simple ones: lines of light and shadow.

As for the panel itself, raising and fielding is one solution, and a flat panel is a second. Fielding two sides instead of all four lies in between the two. You get the visual strength of the vertical fielding, without cross-grain busyness at top and bottom. Since the wood doesn’t move in length, just make a square tongue to fit the groove, with a tight (shadow-free) shoulder line.

To get the most out of highly figured wood, try making an overlay panel. The overlay panel comes forward and the frame recedes. With wide boards, make a single panel. With narrow boards, either glue up or else add muntins to divide the frame. The highlights and shadows created by the two levels of panel and frame will really be dramatic.

Learning to see light and shadow is the key to making frame-and-panel doors. To take control of visual effects, you have to take a step beyond technique. The next step is to turn the process around by modifying your techniques to achieve the visual effects you want. This is design at its most practical level. It’s very satisfying to work out a solution that not only gets the most out of your materials and shop time, but also produces a set of cabinet doors that really do look their best.