Just some of my thoughts on this.
If you don't have much experience building woodworking, a majorly complex project can be painfully impossible to accomplish. Whoever built the shelf you link to has some serious experience with joinery or knew someone that did.
Without a good plan or a good idea of what you intend to accomplish you may be headed for a disasterous waste of materials.
Learning some techniques for joinery can help accomplish something unusual and strong if you get lucky and find a good idea.
Look in the book sections at Home Improvement stores for books on woodworking joinery and shelving for ideas. I found a few books back in the 90's when I started to have an interest in woodworking. But I went way overboard in buying woodworking tools and in self designed computer programming to design plans. Without a good plan, plan on wasting wood.
Most fancy joinery requires special woodworking tools. Even simple joints can be bad if you don't get a good square cut. Using a skill saw alone, usually won't get you by very well. A chop saw or power miter saw would help a lot. But using full sized plywood you would probably need a table saw to cut it accurately enough. Solid plank wood is sold too, in up to a foot wide lengths, in various wood species. These are usually used for shelving. It can be edge glued to get wider widths. But you need clamps to do that. One thing there is never enough of when doing woodworking is clamps. Never enough of the right type of clamp.
Putting a thin back on a weak shelf system can add a lot of strength and rigidity to the structure. Thin wood on the shelving would probably require some support framing to support the weakness of the thin wood. 3/4 inch unsupported wood would be about the thinnest you would want to use. With an outside face frame that is physically attached and glued to the shelving and a solid back, you can substantially reduce the thickness of the shelving material.
Plywood also has the unattractive feature of its layered edge. Face framing hides that and adds strength.
Here's a more simple shelf with some basic plans. You could vary the shelf height on each unit to add some imbalance to it. The simple back board in this design would make it fairly strong.
http://www.instructables.com/id/60-minute-bookcase/
Steve
I need to make shelves w/ 1/2" sandeply or birch ( thinner preferred due to being in kids room). I want to make this in a geometric pattern if i can to create more cubbies rather than boring shelves. You have no idea how long ive searched for building ideas for this. All i find are pics never the instructions. Any advice or standard on how to start whether with verticals or horizontals, with nails or screws. Im actually afraid of nails as they seem to take alot of muscle. But screws can split right? I would construct a base frame then want to add verticals here and there but they would stay put how? Build from the bottom up?
Large Example
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