OIH Designs ceased operations in mid 2022, and there are no current plans to resume operations.
This website is left up for several reasons, including to act as reference for people who need something like one of the products and are willing to make their own. I did not ultimately pursue patents on any of my designs (and I am well passed the deadline to do so), so anyone is free to copy the designs and make their own (you could even copy my design and sell it, although I have significant doubts that it can be done at anything approaching a reasonable profit).
See our “make your own MultiBoard” Section for explicit advice and instructions.
Our Products and Pages:
The Wind-Resistant Clipboard
The MultiBoard For Geology / Fieldwork
A Half-Size Geology Kit
An Aluminum Full-Size MultiBoard
The Wind-Resistant Clipboard
The Spinning Mineral Gallery
Various minerals photographed as they rotate on a turntable.
(Hover over the left image for an example.)
Geology Protractors
Our geology protractors put 0° at the top. Available in durable PETG, economic clear acrylic, and impossible-to-lose-in-the-field florescence red acrylic.
About Obvious in Hindsight (OIH) Designs:
Founder Nick Mann testing a prototype MultiBoard on a Cornell College geology field trip to New Zealand in Feb 2019
Obvious in Hindsight (OIH) Designs makes the MultiBoard, a modular cross between a binder and clipboard. We also make the Wind-Resistant Clipboard, Geology Protractors (0° at the top), and various other products.
OIH Designs was founded by Nick Mann in late 2018 while he was a geology student at Cornell College. Nick needed a mapboard for field work, and thought he could do better than what was out there. It turned into a very deep rabbit hole. OIH Designs exists through the infrastructure support of Mechanical GIFs and is based in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
In his other life, Nick is the photographer of the books: “The Elements” (2009), “Molecules” (2014), “Reactions” (2017) and “How Things Work” (2019) each written by Theodore Gray. He also photographed “Skulls” (2012) by Simon Winchester.