BRICK BY BRICK A CHRONOLOGICAL ANALYSIS ABOUT A TOY COMPANY WHO CHANGED THE WORLD

Transcription

1 BRICK BY BRICK A CHRONOLOGICAL ANALYSIS ABOUT A TOY COMPANY WHO CHANGED THE WORLD LEGO toy company since 1932 has been impressing the young and young-at-heart for 80 years now and in 2008 they celebrated the 50th anniversary for the invention of the LEGO brick. The timeline itself was created by the LEGO group and was published in For LEGO color is a very important part of the product and information regarding the company should represented to reflect the company, and I believe this information does a great job at expressing the company s success throughout the years. The Brick itself is a icon to the world and even the name LEGO is a houshold name. The reason I chose this as my timeline is because as a child I would constantly play with LEGOs and I am certain that they have lead me to the architecture profession which persuit today. CASEY COTCAMP. ENGL PROF. K. BROOKS

2 Now let s take a closer look at the timeline itself, but first to understand the timeline we must understand the subject, the lego brick, not to be confused with the company as a whole, this timeline is simply celebrating the 50th anniversary of the LEGO brick itself. In McCloud s reading of chapter 2 he writes about reality vs. meaning/language, the reality of the brick is tangible and it is what it is, whether you think of different size bricks, they are real, but the meaning of the brick is different what does the brick conceptionally do to the mind when the icon itself is brought up. Does this timeline help with that, could it change the way we think? It is very interesting that when this picture (duck toy on left) is show, you may simply think to yourself that it s just a childs toy, some may never guess that it was the first product by LEGO produced and when you look at the company and expect an aspect-to-aspect presentation with the brick (on right) you could easily stumple in to non-sequitur images as explained by McCloud in chapter 3. The image was repesented first on purpose to show where the brick has come from and how it got to be. If it wasn t for the duck there would be no brick. The image shown here on the left is what I believe to be probably the most important part of the timeline. The black and white picture is shown to give a sense of place and time, an era. After WWII is over the company bought their first plastic modling machine in 1947 and started developing the brick. Now notice, up until this point the LEGO group has used a simple yellow-gold line to represented movement through the years but at this specific point you can see a faded brick, which the reader probably assumes that the development and release of this icon plastic toy is in production. this is a very important piece of information in the timeline because from here on the line used to help us cascade through the years is now represented by colored LEGO bricks which really ties the whole timeline together. The two dates shown above are the only two years shown on the timeline in a bold red. Very meaningful for the company s timeline because these two dates are the most important for the article itself. Representational of the 50 year anniversary these headings need to be drawn to the eye and easily read for the reader. Notice the title at the bottom left corner of the timeline. This is very interesting. As our eyes are trained to read from top to bottom, left to right., Some may neglect the red title floating around at the bottom. I think LEGO did a great job on this part. Not too over powering but existant, subtle and informative. This is probably the most important part of the timeline and having the title near the bottom lets your eyes glance the information sub-contiously and absorb the context of the title.

3 Being that the company is based in Denmark, global expansion is very impoartant to a company. America is definatley a place to set your sights on as a company and LEGO as of 1973 sets up base in America. Showing the american flag on a denmark company timeline is a very important step and the flag, iconic in itself, is self explainatory and represents how the company is growing and expanding their horizons to new markets all over the world. The lines I have added to the timeline are to represent the company as a whole, the lines I placed were to show how the company has flourished over the years and you can see by the shape of the timeline and the lines that there are plenty more products. How a company can start small and make it big. This part of the timeline was very interesting to me and I just wanted to point out a few things about it. The reason for these caption bubbles, I think is to show graphically that the company is fun and lively with energy. The comments are relevent and topical but yet neither of these toys talk to eachother but I think it may be a sence of comedic relief to a fun informative timeline. If the comment bubble were not added I think it would ve been the same but it does add just that little spark of a smile. It almost reminds me of reading a comic book and I wonder if the author intended on readers feeling this way. The design of this timeline is very important, where do the colors fit it? how can we show progression, here we will look at the choice of progression and lines. AS we discussed earlier the transfer from before the brick to after the release of the brick is a very important step for the design of this timeline and you can see the designer makes it clear when that happens near the beginning. What is very important about this timeline is color, I really don t think this could be the same in black and white, the bricks are in color for a reason and it was done this way on purpose for the consumer and readers to draw them in for an appeal to the eye. If i were to hand this in in black and white i really think we be unable to an analysis on this timeline. Let us take a look at something else that is also very important about this timeline that may be over looked. the lines connecting dates to pictures and information, they are think almost too think to see. I think this was done on purpose to not take away from the pictures and the actual timeline itself. The lines are simple and clear and does a great job at making sure they do not over power the important information that is given to us to help understand the timeline.

4 Putting the LEGO timeline into a category may seem easy but if you think about it I can be quite difficult. First of all I intended the timeline to be duo-specific where the words and pictures essentially mean the same thing as told in Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. I felt this way because I have been around legos ever since I was a little boy, so I am used to seeing the pictures and knowing subconsciously what the product names were so the information typed means the same to me just as the pictures do. After being confident in my decision I started to look at my decision again and to the amateur eye without knowling Lego it would be very hard without the text or equally without the pictures to understand what author was trying to say. Inter-dependent feels much more appropriate for this timeline because without the pictures, it woul dnot be as graphically appealing of course, but also to someone who in unfamiliar with the company would have no idea what the author was talking about, and this goes the same with the text. If there was no text it would be really hard to understand what the products were and why they were important. I now came to the conclusion that this LEGO timeline could easily fit in at least two categories if not more. A shown below I have taken the pictures out versus the images. As you can see with the top image without the pictures one would have no clue on what the products would look like and the reader would be lost and confused on what each line leads to and what the text is refering too. I think what is really important that I failed to realize is that with the bottom pictures without text, we have no idea when the company started or at what point these product were release or even what the mean or what they are. I even decided to take the title out of the picture as well because that is also part of the timeline and without any text some might even be confused on what the timeline means?

5 As we can see LEGO has made a great impact on society, and not just here but all over the world, in every playroom, on every self. This timeline is very important to many people, For some it maybe shows how old they are now but still feel happy reading about the toys that everyone seemed to grow up with. It is important the time show youth and joy while reading it and also reflect the company which is difficult to do both. I hope that this helped you understand what this timeline means to me and why I chose it. We have broken this thing down piece by piece, by picture and colors, the importance is that we both are now able to understand what makes this timeline important. The LEGO Group has chosen all the parts of this timeline on purpose, and I strongly agree they did a good job. The progession of this company has come along way from the beginning and the continue to grow brick by brick. Sources & Citations McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding comics - the invisible art. (1st ed.). New York, NY: Harper. DOI: Mings, J. (28, Jan 08). Lego bricks inspiring kids for 50 years. Retrieved from mack.com/design/lego-bricks-inspiring-kids-for- 50-years/ Diaz, J. (28, Jan 08). Lego brick timeline: 50 years of building frenzy and curiosities. Retrieved from CASEY COTCAMP. ENGL PROF. K. BROOKS