Form Follows Function: The Evolution of Fingerboard Shapes
In 1896, the American architect Louis Sullivan wrote that a building's shape should emerge from its purpose rather than be dressed up to disguise it — a principle he called "form follows function."
The phrase outlived Sullivan's own buildings, picked up decades later by Bauhaus designers who sharpened it into doctrine, and eventually landed in mid-century furniture and industrial design as shorthand for a whole worldview: that an object's honesty could be read in how little it bothered to hide what it was for.
It is a strange, unlikely inheritance for a wooden deck made for two fingers instead of two feet — and yet fingerboarding may be one of the more legitimate places the principle has landed.
Few people have spent as long testing that constraint as Mike Schneider. He was still a kid when he founded FlatFace Fingerboards in 2003, convinced he could improve on the mass-produced Tech Deck decks that dominated the category at the time — a conviction that, by most accounts, turned out to be right. What began as a kid's hobby grew, over two decades, into one of the largest fingerboard companies in the world.
Ask Mike today (so we did!) what a deck is supposed to do, and he will not start with aesthetics — he will start with the hand, with grip, with flick, with the particular mechanics of a trick performed at a scale this small. The FlatFace G-series, pared down to what the hand actually needs, reads less like a stylistic choice than the latest iteration of an argument over a century old — arrived at not through doctrine, but through a career spent solving the same problem again and again.
We sat down with Mike Schneider, founder of FlatFace Fingerboards, to talk about the evolution of fingerboard shapes: where they came from, how they've changed, and what he's learned shaping decks for over two decades. His answers are woven throughout the piece below, alongside the broader design history that shaped the question in the first place.
Origins & Mimicry
Fingerboard itself did not begin with an original shape. It began with a copy — a miniature echo of skateboard decks its earliest makers rode, scaled down before anyone had asked what a deck ought to do differently at finger scale. Early fingerboards borrowed everything from their full-size counterparts. The logic wasn't wrong, exactly — it was simply unexamined. A skateboard looked like this, so a fingerboard should too.
What changed that logic wasn't theory. It was use. Riders started noticing that shapes optimized for a foot didn't necessarily serve a finger, and the earliest divergence in fingerboard design came not from a manifesto but from thousands of small, practical disappointments — decks that looked right and still felt wrong under the fingers.
(NY) When you first started making decks, how much of the shape was inherited from skateboard design versus something you were figuring out fresh?
(MS) The shape was 100% inspired by skateboards, because a fingerboard is a miniature skateboard. I had just gotten into skateboarding and then found fingerboarding fascinating because of my love for skateboarding. So making a fingerboard was just making a mini skateboard. It was based off other fingerboards (my first fingerboard was a tech deck) which were also based off skateboards.
Five Objects, One Argument: Mid-Century Design and the FlatFace Lineage, Side by Side
If fingerboarding's early shapes were borrowed, its later ones were argued into existence — the same way mid-century design arrived at restraint only after years of testing, discarding, and refining. Laid one-to-one against FlatFace's own documented history, five objects trace a strikingly similar arc, decades apart and in entirely unrelated materials.
1. Eames molded plywood experiments (1946) ↔ The first FlatFace deck (2003~).
Charles and Ray Eames spent the early-to-mid 1940s experimenting with bent plywood through their Kazam! machine, work that produced their first molded plywood furniture line at Herman Miller in 1946 — rough, exploratory, more proof-of-concept than finished statement.
FlatFace's earliest decks occupy the same position in its own timeline. The first FlatFace deck emerged directly out of what some in the community consider fingerboarding's golden age, sharing its earliest run with legacy fingerboard brands before growing into its own identity — a starting point, not yet an argument.
2. Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye (1931) ↔ FlatFace's G4 (~2005)
Completed in Poissy in 1931, Villa Savoye stands as the purest built expression of Le Corbusier's Five Points of Architecture — pilotis, free plan, free façade, horizontal windows, roof garden — a house he described as "a machine for living in," its white, rectilinear volumes a deliberate rejection of ornamentation in favor of structural honesty.
FlatFace's third, fourth generations mark a comparable turn toward deliberateness: a move to a sharper mold with more careful sanding, refinements made in step with Mike's own growing skill — the moment early experimentation starts reading more as an actual design system on top of trial and error.
(NY) What does a deck actually need to do mechanically that most people don't think about — grip, flick, pop, concave?
(MS) The board needs to be easy to use, meaning it should make tricks work. Some fingerboards are just better than others, and as you get more skill and experience you become tuned to these things. It’s the same as skateboarding too, sometimes you try somebody else’s board and you can’t do anything on it, other times you use someone’s board and it’s way better than yours. The shape and details can work in many different ways but there are certain ways of balancing that, plus the materials and construction methods, to make it as good as it can be. You can have two same decks on paper, in terms of shape and angles and dimensions, but one of them is much better than the other just because of something like the glue or type of wood or how much pressure was used. There are tons of details that can derail a good board.
3. The Braun SK4 (1956) ↔ FlatFace's G12 (2009).
Dieter Rams helped shape the Braun SK4 record player, a compact hi-fi unit remembered for one specific decision: a clear Perspex lid that let the listener see the turntable mechanism working underneath, rather than hiding it inside a wooden cabinet like every record player before it. The press nicknamed it "Snow White's Coffin."
By 2009, FlatFace had reached a comparable point of confidence in its own construction — deck generations advancing with the function-first logic, nothing dressed up to disguise what the shape was actually doing.
(NY) Is there a specific shape element — nose length, concave depth, width — that only makes sense once you understand finger mechanics rather than foot mechanics?
(MS) It’s generally the same, but in fingerboarding there’s more to play with in terms of kick steepness. You can make a board that is so steep or so mellow, it would be challenging to use on a skateboard, but easy to use on a fingerboard. The amount of force needed to move things is much smaller on a fingerboard.
FlatFace's own documented history bears this iteration out plainly. By April 2011 — less than a decade after Mike founded the company as a kid — FlatFace had already progressed through generation after generation of mold, arriving at a G-12 shape with a G-13 already in development. That pace of revision looks less like a hobbyist tinkering between school assignments and more like a design practice finding its own principles through sheer repetition.
(NY) Where would you place FlatFace's early shapes relative to what other makers were doing at the time — what were you reacting to or against?
(MS) I try not to compare my work to what others are doing in that way, I was more exploring what needs to happen to make my board better by trying different things. In general most boards of the time were somewhat similar in the early years, with a shape that is somewhat like an old tech deck shape, and then slightly steeper sometimes. All boards were 26mm back then, so mine were too. It took a long time before we all started making wider decks. I don’t think it was until G16 where I said “I’m going to do something people are going to be shocked by” and made a board that was way different than the general norm at the time. I just felt it’s where it needed to go, it was inspired by one of my favorite boards, a G15.12 that had accidentally come out too steep (sometimes wood bends strangely over time etc).
4. The Braun T3 pocket radio (1958) ↔ The G15.12 (~2014)
The T3 reduced a portable radio to a single circular speaker grille and one control dial, removing every element that wasn't load-bearing to the object's actual job. It wasn't minimal because minimal was fashionable — it was minimal because Rams and his team had gone through the object piece by piece and asked what each part was doing.
The G15.12 shape brings back the famous G12 shape on a shorter wheelbase and wider board, occupying a similar role in FlatFace's lineage: a design reimagined from a new yet familiar feel shape to bring back nostalgia. A baseline against which the next generation would be measured, valued precisely because it had already cut away what didn't need to be there.
5. The Braun ET66 calculator (1987) ↔ The FlatFace G15 (2012~).
Working alongside Dietrich Lubs, Rams applied the same reductive logic to the ET66 calculator — a rectangular body, a logical button grid, convex circular keys, no ornamentation beyond what the interface required.
By the time the G15 arrived, refining the already-popular G14 shape, FlatFace's design process had converged on something close to Rams' own late-career instinct — and, further back, the Eameses' — change only what the evidence demands. A longer wheelbase. Shorter kicks. Medium concave, tuned for control. Nothing about the G15 announces itself as a design statement, which, per Sullivan, per Rams, and per the Eameses alike, is exactly what makes it one.
The G15 occupies the same kind of long arc inside fingerboarding: introduced as a refinement of the G14 — a slightly longer wheelbase, shorter kicks, a nose set higher than the tail to mirror real skateboard geometry and aid flip-trick mechanics — it is now regarded as a staple shape still in production more than thirteen years later. Getting the reduction right the first time, in both cases, meant not having to do it again.
(NY) The G15's natural bottom ply reads as restraint — was that a deliberate statement, or did it fall out of solving something functional first?
(MS) Just making a board really. I always prefer blanks over graphics, so I made tons of blanks. Maple is one of the best woods for a skateboard and for a fingerboard. I love the way a nice blank looks.
The Divergence Point — Function at Finger Scale
Once fingerboards stopped replicating skateboards outright, the real work began: figuring out what a deck needs to do that a skateboard never had to. Concave that reads correctly under a fingertip instead of a shoe sole. Kicks proportioned to finger flick rather than ankle snap. The difference in the amount of friction between foam grip and rough grip tape.
(NY) Walk me through the G-series specifically — what problem was it solving that earlier shapes didn't?
(MS) All the generations are basically me trying to make a better mold. I don’t know that all of them were better than the previous but they were all an attempt to be. It’s all personal preference anyways, but some of the absolute best ones are G4, G7 (clone of G4), G12 (low concave, long middle, medium kicks), G15.12 (G12 with shorter middle), G15 (G12 with deeper concave and slightly shorter middle), and G16 (low concave like a G12, steeper kicks).
There are other generations in between with subtle changes etc. which have been mostly lost to time but exist in people’s collections. I still have the molds for a few other generations like G9, G11, and of course the original G4 plus the new copy of it I made in metal and brought back recently.
Maker vs. Collector Tension
FlatFace sells to riders chasing performance and to collectors chasing an object worth keeping — and the G15's thirteen-plus years in continuous production suggests those two audiences have, at least for this shape, wanted roughly the same thing. That alignment isn't guaranteed. It raises the question of whether Mike is designing toward one audience and simply satisfying the other as a byproduct, or whether — after two decades of iteration — the distinction has stopped being a factor to him at all.
(NY) When you're shaping a new deck, are you designing for how it rides or how it reads as an object — or do those stop being separate questions for you?
(MS) 100% how it rides. I make fingerboards for use. Even the ones that get extra time and effort like a special bottom ply or something, it’s still intended to be used, and I would rather see it shredded than preserved. It’s a functional item, the art is a fun bonus.
(NY) Has collector taste changed the way you approach shape decisions, even subtly?
(MS) It could go anywhere really, and it’s going everywhere. Since I released the G16, a lot of companies started copying that too. But we still get a ton of requests for the G15 which I still think is one of my greatest shapes of all time too, and I use that a lot. We are all experimenting with many different shapes and using what works best and having fun with the rest, I think the scene will continue to go in that direction, essentially a little of everything.
Final Thoughts
Louis Sullivan wrote his principle for buildings. The Eameses spent a decade testing it in plywood before their most famous chair ever reached a television studio. Dieter Rams spent forty years applying it to radios, shavers, and calculators before finally writing it down as doctrine.
Mike Schneider has spent more than two decades applying it to an object smaller than any of them likely imagined the argument would ever reach.
Where the principle goes next — inside fingerboarding, or beyond it — is a question better answered by the person still shaping the object than by anyone else.
Special thanks to Mike for helping make this article a reality!
We’ve been working on this topic for quite some time, and there’s no better person to help shape this piece than the GOAT himself.
Comments