Outside of LEGO conventions and LUG meetups, the LEGO community primarily gathers online. With forums, social media and chat apps, AFOLs have been sharing their creative work digitally for years. The rise of the decent phone camera has exacerbated this trend, making sharing your MOCs the easiest it has ever been. But when you have a lot of ideas and build quickly, sometimes completing only the MOC's front side that will be photographed is all I have time for… and who else will know? Is this a LEGO building sin that needs to be confessed or a shrewd speed building secret for the digital age? Is only building the parts of a MOC that will be photographed sheer laziness? Is it a smart strategy to build more? To explore these questions, let me share with you a bit of my building process. The Need For Speed When I build MOCs, my...

Earlier this year, a new website joined the AFOL eco-system: Open L-Gauge. It is aimed at a very specific target audience of LEGO train builders but could have impact far beyond the train community. Open L-Gauge logo Instead of describing the site for you, I’ll let the site speak for itself: “The goal of Open L-Gauge is to make high-quality LEGO train models available to everyone in the community, but we do want to set some rules for how these models can be used. The goal of the site is to encourage the sharing and remixing of ideas with other LEGO train fans and simultaneously protect the original designers against commercial parties reselling their designs without permission.” I wanted to find out the story behind the site so at a recent LEGO train event in the Netherlands, I met up with two of the driving forces behind the creation of Open...

Bonus points if you can work out which fonts have been used. Hint, all have been used by LEGO and some can be found below! In the last couple of years, you may have noticed the boxes, instructions and LEGO website looking a little different. A small facelift perhaps? What you might’ve seen but not realized is that LEGO is now almost fully switched over to a new brand font. Cera Pro is now in full flight within the brand, and I have one main theory as to why I believe this switch was enacted. Other than shaking up the style a little with Cera Pro’s slightly playful characters, accessibility is its strong suit. The website now follows the same typographic choices as the packaging; not previously possible with Chalet. Cera Pro in its entirety supports more than 270 languages with its Cyrillic and Greek character sets, allowing for a far...

Finding LEGO-themed clothing in adult sizes can be a problem. There have been times when LEGOLAND theme parks or LEGOLAND Discovery Centres have stocked clothing for adults, but it’s usually limited to t-shirts, jackets or hats. Occasionally there have been t-shirts in Uniqlo, sportswear from Adidas and various clothing from Target US. And, of course, there are any number of print-on-demand or fan-designed products available from various online sources. But this story is not about any of those retailers—rather, it is about Target Australia, adult-sized pyjamas (PJs) and the patience of AFOLs. The PJs as seen on the Target Australia website One of the things I like to do is highlight to other LEGO fans when new licensed products become available, with the hope that they will do the same for me. I’m as big a fan of the themed merchandise as I am of LEGO sets and parts. If it’s...

What math is hidden in your favorite circular LEGO sets, how do designers build the perfect sphere, and how do numbers magically make LEGO geometry work so perfectly? To help answer those questions, we are pleased to feature another guest article from Deep Shen, a well-rounded builder who discusses the hidden math of LEGO circles and spheres. Deep’s portfolio of work can be found at Towering Brick Creations, on his Flickr page and on Instagram. A Shield and A Globe In August 2023, LEGO released a new set (76262) that creates a reasonably accurate replica of Captain America’s Shield from the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). The initial fan reactions to this set were less than positive, with some people comparing it unfavorably to the bigger (and more expensive) custom version sold by Bricker Builds. That particular version is built as a sculpture created by stacking regular plates, which makes it far...