Lego building instructions through time

bombcar

If you've ever made a digital model of Lego it can be quite surprising just how hard it is to make good instructions at the quality of Lego's - because you have to not only consider how the model goes together (can't place a brick after the bricks on top of it) but also how you can even SEE what the piece is and where it's going.

xixixao

I would love simpler (harder) instructions! It's too easy tbh brick by brick as it is today. 1964 looks lovely. I also have a gripe with the complexity of modern bricks (besides "basic bricks" sets). It's getting harder to build something else than what the model is.

hmartin

Might as well mention a couple of lego projects I've been working on, a parts browser TUI and a 3D model (eg .stl or .obj) to lego model (ldraw) converter: https://github.com/hbmartin/pyldraw3/ https://github.com/hbmartin/legolization/ I'm actively trying to get good instructions out of the legolization project now

aleksejs

Buried at the bottom of the article, my favorite thing about modern Lego kits: > One of the most intriguing features is unlocked when you press the ‘build together’ button on select sets in the app. This allows consumers to build a LEGO set as a team by delegating each builder a building task to complete. My partner and I enjoy assembling Lego kits together, but with paper instructions parallelizing the work is pretty tricky (usually we end up alternating one person doing the actual assembly and the other picking out the correct parts for them). But with the LEGO Builder app, it dynamically generates two parallel sets of instructions. It works great even if you're working at different paces. This is one of those software features that delights me both as a user and as an engineer. It probably was not that complex to implement (once they had the building steps in a machine-readable format), but it's a great use of its medium, something that you genuinely couldn't do without software.

lostlogin

There is other good stuff on that site. Eg that tractor. https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/d-the-lego-fergu...

no-name-here

Very interesting article, but not well written. A few examples from the first part: 1. Partway through, “We know for a fact that from 1967 and until 2003 the main supplier of drawing building steps for the LEGO Group was a company called Palle…”. That’s a super odd thing to preface with “We know for a fact” - are all the other items in the article not prefaced with that not actually known?? 2. They jump around a little in time, such as mentioning the 60s but then going back to the 50s in the next section. 3. Some photos but not all show what year (or decade) they are from. 4. They start by mentioning the 50s, but it would be helpful to also mention how long the bricks were made before then to quickly understand the length of the pre-instruction era - it appears 49, or 39 for wood versions, per some quick googling.