REICH COMMUNICATIONS

A LEGO Story

 

I read today of the death of Danish inventor Jens Nygaard Knudsen.  What could be his most notable achievement was his role in creating LEGO mini-figures, the ubiquitous people who inhabit the LEGO places we build.  They debuted on the market in the late 1970s, to populate LEGO landscapes that were sold in boxed sets.  The mini-figures themselves have become movie stars, with the first LEGO movie in 2014 ranking among the top-grossing films that year.

This news started me searching about the history of LEGOS. 

I didn’t remember them from my childhood.  When I was a kid, the building toys back then were Erector Sets – metal girders that you had to screw together with nuts and bolts.  I also remember Lincoln Logs, wooden pieces that had grooves at each end so they’d fit together.

But I first saw LEGOs when my kids were little in the late 1970s.  I loved them – still do.  I’d spend hours sitting on the floor with Jennifer and then with Michael, building things from the plans in the box, but just as often freestyling, making buildings and towers as tall as I could get them without toppling over.

And then my kids outgrew them.  So my LEGO play stopped until Jen had kids and, once again, I’d be on the floor with Jack and then with Gabriel.  We made space ships, cars, boats – you name it.

And then my grandsons outgrew LEGOs.  But I never did.

The countless plastic pieces remained in our basement where, from time to time, I’d walk past a partly-built structure and add a few pieces or switch things around.  Until just recently, when I cleaned up the basement, there were a few towers that just about touched the ceiling.  I’d sometimes get lost down there, trying to make them sturdier or higher.

In my online searching, I learned that Mr. Knudsen was part of a long line of imaginative folk who brought those plastic bricks to life. LEGOs actually began with a Danish carpenter, Ole Kirk Christiansen, who had a store where he sold his handmade step-ladders and ironing boards.  In the mid-1930s he developed building blocks that would interconnect.  The first were the large blocks now known as Duplo, that younger children play with.  He then began making smaller bricks and called his company “Play Well,” which in Danish is spelled leg godt.  That became LEGO, as we know it today.

During World War II, traditional toy-making materials wood and metal were scarce, but plastic was readily available.  Christiansen bought the first plastic injection-molding machine in Denmark and set it to work making plastic bricks and other parts.

Christiansen died in 1958, but his son continued the business, expanding it through Europe and, in 1972, to the U.S.

Estimates have the number of LEGO pieces produced since the 1950s at more than 400 billion, or enough for every person on earth to have 64 pieces.  Visit a LEGO store now and you’ll see entire cites built of LEGOs.  The LEGO store in Rockefeller Center here has a mini-Rock Center, complete with the skating rink.  At the Los Angeles Auto Show a year ago, I saw a full-size McClaren sports car completely made of LEGOs. 

 

I know some adults who, like me, enjoy playing with LEGOs.  It keeps the “kid” in us alive by helping us “play well.”

Packaging Likes and Dislikes

 

Packaging:  It's something most consumers hardly think about, unless there's a problem.

A recent survey, reported last week by Marketing Daily, finds almost everyone is satisfied with current packaging in the foods and beverage categories.  Only five percent expressed dissatisfaction with packaging for breakfast cereals, snack foods/cookies and salads.  The rate of dissatisfaction was even lower -- a low as one percent -- for coffees, juice, soda and sauces.

Nearly two-thirds, however, feel many food products are "over-packaged."

Convenience is seen by consumers as the most important aspect of good food packaging.  Ease of opening and the ability re-seal are listed as top priorities.  Packaging attractiveness and depiction of a realistic image of the food product are not, ironically, seen as important factors by consumers surveyed.  Food marketers and package designers, I'm sure, wouldn't agree.

I think the results might be different if the survey had also asked about non-foods packaging.  How many of us, for example, have struggled to open products packaged in that hard, transparent flexible packaging, the kind often used for hardware, toys and electronics?  How many of us have suffered cuts from the razor-sharp jagged edges once you finally do manage to get the package partly open?  Larry David devoted much of a hilarious "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode to that impossible packaging.

We've also seen some examples of brilliant packaging, like the iconic plastic egg used to package L'eggs pantyhose.   I was the lead on the PR team that helped launch the product for Hanes back in the mid-1970s, and the distinct packaging was a key part of the story back then.  Not only did it stand out from the clutter of supermarket and drug store shelves, but it served other important functions as well. Back then, L'eggs was one of the first unboarded hosiery products, which meant basically that it hadn't been ironed flat to take the shape of a leg.  Instead, it took the shape of the leg once it was put on, which helped make it fit so well.  But all scrunched up, it didn't look particularly pretty or sexy, so the package had to actually hide the product from view.  And it needed to be bulky so it couldn't be easily stolen.  Of course, those latter packaging design requirements weren't usually told to the consumer.  But the package concept fell together beautifully, as executed for Hanes by Herb Lubalin and Pushpin Studios.

It's quite different from much of today's grocery packaging, which the survey seems to show hardly registers with shoppers.

 

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Happy birthday Helvetica

Helvetica celebrates its 50th birthday this year.  So says I.D. Magazine in its April issue.

A little research shows that when it was designed in 1957, it was initially called Neue Haas Grotesk -- kind of a grotesque-sounding (no pun intended) name.  Thankfully, it was renamed Helvetica, taken from Helvetia, Latin for Switzerland, where the Haas Type Foundry was located.

It's been called one of the most-loved and respected typefaces and certainly it is one of the most widely-used.  Its clean sans serif look reflected the move toward modernism and the clean look typical of Swiss design at the time.

In 1961, Haas Foundry's parent companies Stempel and Linotype began marketing the font worldwide.  Some critics have written that Univers is a  better-design system.  But Helvetic won out, it seems, for two key reasons.

Linotype did a better job of marketing the new typeface.  Swiss design was the "in" thing in the early '60s, and  the sales pitch for Helvetica was smart and to the point, essentially saying "You want Swiss design?  Here it is."

In an interview in I.D. Magazine, filmmaker Gary Hustwit sums it up -- "Helvetica was Swiss design in a can."  (Hustwit recently released a documentary film titled Helvetica, which premiered at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin in April.)

Ad agencies and design firms wanting to be modern and trendy began using Helvetica widely in ad headlines and copy, in company brochures and even in logos.  Helvetica is still embazoned on many corporate headquarters.

The font got another big boost with the advent of personal computers.  Steve Jobs is reputedly serious about typefaces and he, so the story goes,  selected Helvetica to be bundled into the typefaces available in the early Macs.

It used to be that most people, unless they were designers or involved in printing and design, generally had little or no knowledge of different typefaces.  With computers, however, we've all become instant designers.  And by simply clicking on the "font" bar in our Word documents, we've come to know names like Arial, Tahoma, Century Gothic and the ubiquitous Times New Roman.

But even after 50 years, Helvetica has a special place on many designers' tables.

When you're playing around with different fonts on your computer, which ones do you enjoy and why?   Just curious.  One I like is Comic Sans -- it's clean, but  not at all plain.  For letters and news releases, though, I stick with either Times New Roman or Arial.