Exclusive: Lego’s official version of the classic rainbow stripe Polaroid OneStep SX-70 instant camera gave us a window into Lego’s world.
Marc Corfmat was a teenager when he began to compete for Lego’s ultimate prize: the chance to design an official set. He and his brother Nick had been building custom Lego creations ever since they were kids, sometimes in California, sometimes during vacations at their grandparents’ home in La Rochelle, France. They shared their modelsand posted their creations to Lego’s website, but interest from the Lego world came slowly, if it came at all.
Everything just clicked. “All the angles were lining up perfectly, everything was working,” he says. “It very quickly became apparent to me that I was falling in love with this thing.” The Lego Ideas Polaroid OneStep in final prototype form, with its film bay open, sitting alongside its brick-built film box and photocards.
Each project moving through the Lego Ideas program starts the same way: a Lego designer tries to replicate the original fan creation in the real world to see what works and what doesn’t. In Lego’s Billund, Denmark, headquarters, designers walk through a room called the Brick Library that’s filled with veritable supermarket aisles of parts sorted by color and shape. They can take whatever they need.a straightforward series of steps.
Lego went through many iterations of the Polaroid set’s internal mechanism, seen here without any housing — there are a few different ways to let the shutter button release a spring-loaded lever. “It definitely didn’t work the first time,” says Scott. “I don’t know how many versions James went through.” They had to tinker with tiny details to make the mechanism work — making the contraption half a Lego plate thicker here or moving it over by one brick’s width.
But Lego’s textile department came to the rescue: “We found this card, could we use this for anything?” Scott remembers them asking. It was a thin sheet of matte polypropylene plastic — a “foil” — that had only been used a couple of times before in Lego sets, most prominentlySo, Lego graphics designer Matthew Parsons, who typically works for the Lego City team, embedded himself in the company’s textile department to help figure out the foils.
Lego graphics designer Matthew Parsons’ sketches and art for one included photocard, starting in black and white, then color, then refined.The final prototype photocards in real life, sitting against the Lego camera. Overall, I’m wildly impressed by the result. I bought the actual 1977 camera over a year ago just because, and I sometimes mistake one for the other on my office shelf. The size, shapes, and weight are incredibly close — both weigh approximately one pound, with the Lego set’s nose mostly just protruding a little bit more than the actual camera. The body is also a tad narrower.
I haven’t yet gotten to the single most satisfying step in the build, the one Lego saves for last: the iconic Polaroid rainbow stripe on this camera isn’t a sticker. It’s a sideways stack of 1x6 plates andin colors that match up almost perfectly to Polaroid’s original hues, held together by thin Lego pipes. It’s great — but it made me wonder why Lego still does use some other stickers in this design.
On a video call with The Verge, Lego Ideas creative lead Jordan David Scott holds up the key to the rainbow stripe in front of his eyes — a pair of inverted blue tiles with holes inside.Lego’s picker system requires each printed piece to have its own unique storage bin, so rather than continually opening more warehouses, Lego limits how many custom parts designers can introduce each year.
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