Lego building instructions through time

Speaking of drawing building instructions, let’s look at some of the many steps it took to create a building instruction back in the day. Making building instructions was a slow and tedious process. After the designers finished designing and building the model it would be split down into the various building steps – for many years the building steps were decided by the designers themselves. Every building step would be built and put next to each other on a table for review and approval. After being approved pictures would be taken of all the steps, one by one. Each model showing one building step was meticulously placed exactly on the same spot as the previous one and then the next step would follow. Eventually you would be able to match the pictures over each other to form a section by section building instruction. The photos were sent to external partners, like Palle Munch, Grafisk tegnestue & Reklamebureau, who then drew the building steps by hand. The drawings were made in a larger scale (each knob had a diameter of 7,5 mm) to make the detailing easier. Afterwards the drawings of the building steps were scaled down and sent to another company for the finishing touch - coloring. Palle Munch also remembers the physical building steps being shipped to him in boxes, sometimes taking up a lot of room on the company’s premises. This would happen later when Palle and his employees started using other technologies to draw the building steps…