Charting fifty two Years Of Lego Brick colours

In what’s perhaps the most literal chart you’re going to read lately, one member of the Lego fan website Brickset has graphed the ultimate 52 years of Lego bricks offered, by using color.

That’s proper: the actual colors you see on this stacked space chart are actually the colors of Lego bricks sold each yr (calculated with the aid of weight, depicted via share).

whereas its creator—Dave123—admits that the colours he listed ahead of 1970 may be based totally upon much less reliable knowledge, the visual narrative is interesting the entire related. one can find how the dominance of just a few powerful colours, like purple, white, blue, and yellow, have given method to a small mountain striated via many, lesser-launched colors. around 1980, the color gray features fantastic momentum, because of the well-liked medieval castle set, first released in ‘78. (the well-liked house fashions in the ’80s unquestionably helped, too.) Brown catches on after the discharge of Pirates in 1989. And the crazier colours are doubtless pushed by using Lego’s evolved advertising model, which is much less about selling free-building with a few normal colours, and more about selling licensed kits depicting the wild color palettes from the brilliant universes of Disney, wonder, DC, and Minecraft.

in fact, what you can’t see in this chart is, possibly, the much more vital part of the story: That Lego managed to show round their firm through doing so many things other than promoting actual Lego bricks.

[via Randy Olson]