Dear LEGO Ideas members,
With just a few hours before we round off what has been another tremendous year for LEGO Ideas, we'd like to thank you all for your high levels of enthusiasm, engagement and support throughout the year, but just as importantly, throughout the 10 years where we've run this unique and meaningful experience together with you all.
We hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday with time to enjoy the company of your family and friends, while also having time to yourself to reflect on what 2018 has given you and what 2019 has in store as well.
With so many things happening in the world of LEGO Ideas this year we've certainly had plenty to reflect on and plenty to look foward to next year as well.
10 Years Of Your Ideas
In 2018, we were able to celebrate 10 years of officially crowdsourcing LEGO sets through the LEGO CUUSOO and LEGO Ideas community and what a journey it's been! Can you believe it?
Our celebrations saw us hold a number of activities including a contest to see how you'd interpret the LEGO Ideas logo, share the LEGO Ideas story through a Q&A session at Skærbæk Fan Weekend hosted by Beyond the Brick, held a display at LEGO House showcasing some of the many impressive 10K models that unfortunately didn't make it into production, and also held a celebration internally across the globe to remind all of our colleagues of the amazing things that our LEGO fans can create.
It excites us and motivates us to see how LEGO Ideas has grown over the years and we greatly look foward to what the next many years has in store for us.
LEGO Ideas Sets
What a year it's been!! We've seen the launch of 4 incredible LEGO Ideas sets that have brought so much uniqueness to the kinds of LEGO products that exist. These have been the Ship in a Bottle by Jake Sadovich, TRON: Legacy by Tom & Drew, Voltron by Lendy Tayag, as well as more recently the fascinating Pop-Up Book by Grant Davis and Jason Allemann. These launches have also included their own respective signing events around the world from Shanghai, China to Utah, USA.
We've also announced 2 new product ideas that will be turned into official sets next year, namely Andrew Clark's Flintestones model and Kevin Feeser's Treehouse. As to the what else will come, you'll just have to wait and see ;-)
Although we've welcomed many new amazing sets into the proverbial LEGO Ideas Hall of Fame and will add more in 2019, we'll also be saying goodbye to both the Women of NASA and Old Fishing Store sets as they will be retiring soon. Both sets have had unique stories to tell - from Anton's (from the Old Fishing Store) journeys to all we've learnt about the incredible women of NASA and STEM as a whole. Thank you to both Maia Weinstock and Robert Bontenbal in introducing these ideas to us and helping them become a reality!
The LEGO Ideas Experience
Beyond impressive new LEGO sets, this year has also meant broadening the scope of what LEGO Ideas is as an online experience, as we introduced LEGO Contests full-time on LEGO Ideas.
Some of you likely had seen this coming back in early 2017, as we tested "LEGO Ideas Test Lab", which was then followed up with "LEGO Ideas Contests Beta" in late 2017. But for many others this was likely to have been experienced with the re-designed site which lauched in late June.
LEGO Ideas Contests replaced LEGO Rebrick to create ONE centralised go-to experience for LEGO fan creations built upon one, more robust digital platform which aims to serve you even better.
We've heard plenty of feedback on some of our changes year and while some of it has been optimised in recent releases in late 2018, we've got more in the pipeline to fine tune the experience in 2019 to make LEGO Ideas even better.
Continuing To Celebrate LEGO Ideas Members
Celebrating LEGO Ideas members and their creations is so incredible central to everything that LEGO Ideas is about.
For you it's often about the stories that you create through your LEGO designs and for us we love to tell the stories behind that. What made you fall in love with LEGO bricks? What inspired you to build the model you submitted? What kind of challenges did you face when building it and how did you overcome them? Have you shown off your model to others? Where have you exhibited it? We aim to tell these stories in many different ways.
We've continued to evolve the Weekly Digest newsletter with the aim to celebrate LEGO Ideas members even more, show you things you might have missed through the week but also to highlight some high quality fan submissions that you might have overlooked.
We've also starting collaborating more with the LEGO FanTube team as well as LEGO Life. Through LEGO FanTube we've been able to get to know our members on an entirely different level through video interviews to name just a few examples of how video is starting to play an even bigger part on LEGO Ideas, while on LEGO Life we share many of these stories and fan creations to inspire the builders of tomorrow.
We're excited to explore even more avenues for celebrating LEGO Ideas members in 2019.
Please Share With Us
What has been your LEGO Ideas highlight of the year, did you have a favourite LEGO Ideas set and what do you hope to see more of in 2019?
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, but if you have very specific thoughts concerning the digital experience of LEGO Ideas then head on over to our support site, where you can post a new suggestion for what you think we can improve on or change. You can even vote for other suggestions if someone else has already suggested the same thing. Voting for other suggestions gives us a better idea of what many of you think is truly important.
Thank you again for joining us on this LEGO Ideas journey. We certainly look forward to another 10 years of epic fan creations, but for the moment we look forward to 2019 :-)
Happy New Year!!
The LEGO Ideas Team
By
hasanjensen