electric guitars by jacques averna take playful, familiar forms

Jacques Averna crafts functional, playful electric guitars

Designer Jacques Averna recreates the bodies of electric guitars into the shapes of a foot, a fried egg, a padlock, and a pattern of clouds. Still functional, the musical instruments wear bright colors that make them more alluring to look at, capturing the full form of the shape they’re borrowing. Each model starts from a pun, a personal reference, or a structural problem the designer wants to solve in a reimagined, creative, and familiar way. From padlocks to cloud, he takes everyday objects and breathes a sense of wonder back into them. These aren’t just instruments, but vibrant, functional sculptures that bridge the gap between a personal joke and a work of design.

The results are functional instruments that double as decorative objects. Take the Footycaster, whose outline follows the silhouette of a right foot: a wide ball, a raised arch on the left side, and four toes across the bottom edge, each one a rounded cutout. A white rectangular pickguard covers the upper half of the body face, running from the neck joint down to the middle of the foot, and one pickup sits under the pickguard at the neck position, which is a chrome-covered single coil in a rectangular housing. The output jack sits in the bottom right corner, in the area that would be the little toe. Jacques Averna built this playful electric guitar and describes it as a guitar for terrible players, with no volume, no tone controls, and direct access to a single pickup signal.

all images courtesy of Jacques Averna

Designs from padlock to cloud and ‘hook’

The designer also crafted an electric guitar shaped like a pad lock. The body is a rectangular shape, flat and with right-angle corners but no waist. It comes with a headless configuration, a design first developed by Ned Steinberger in 1979 to reduce weight and improve tuning by moving the tuning machines to the bridge end. Below the body, a tube of aluminum bends into a U-shape, forming a loop that drops from the bottom edge and curves back up, mimicking the shape of the lock.

There’s also the Cloud Telecaster, whose body follows the outline of a Telecaster but is cut into the shape of a cloud. The edge runs in rounded bumps, going around the full body outline. It resembles a thought bubble in a comic strip, or the typical cloud in the sky. In fact, the finish is a flat powder blue. Another electric guitar design of Jacques Averna is the Jitar, which has a J-shaped body. It doubles as a hook so users can hang it upside down (even from on top of a door). None of these playful electric guitars come from a production line because Jacques Averna builds them by hand, with a collaborator or alone, from alder, found parts, 3D printed components, and bent aluminum tube. Their designs, then, are intentional but always evoke joy from familiar, everyday objects.

designer Jacques Averna recreates the bodies of electric guitars into familiar shapes