When designer Pedro Neves was an undergraduate student, he attended an advanced seminar during which students were charged with creating an alphabet using modular elements. “As someone with minimal experience with type design, I was struck by the excitement of generating letterforms simply by using pre-existing modules,” he says in a statement. Little did he know that the assignment would spur an international participatory and educational project.
In his faculty role at the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Design, Neves organized a graduate course emphasizing modularity for letterform design and typographic compositions. LEGO turned out to be an ideal system, comprising individual elements that operate on a grid and exist in numerous shapes.
“The system offered an ideal blend of fixed constraints and room for playful exploration. Each brick’s scale and form could not be altered, but the grid’s size could be individually defined,” Neves says. “Students were free to arrange and join bricks, building up their compositions.” It didn’t hurt that they were enthusiastic about LEGO to begin with. And using more portable, inexpensive tools like Provisional Press kits allowed for even more flexibility.
Neves’ desire to explore the potential of LEGO in print led to further collaborations with designers from around the world, each of whom he challenged to create a distinctive letterform. These contributions, submitted from 36 individual designers or studios on six continents, are now compiled in a publication called A2Z: Learning Through LEGO® and Letterforms, which is complemented by an exhibition currently on view at the Design Museum of Chicago.
Neves offered to send participants a physical LEGO set so they could tinker with ideas by hand. Then, for their final designs, which could be layered up to three times to achieve different colors and effects, the designers could use five colors loosely based on CMYK, which Neves selected from the Pantone color system. Every letterform incorporates some combination or selection of aqua, red, yellow, purple, and green.
Eunice Chong, for example, rendered a verdant “R” and shares that her piece embodies aspects of the urban identity and cultural heritage of Singapore, where she calls home. “I drew inspiration from the patterns of Peranakan tiles, known for their ornate designs,” she says. “The floral and greenery elements reflect Singapore’s reputation as a Garden City, where nature is thoughtfully integrated into its urban landscape.”
Once the designers had created their pieces, they returned digital templates to Neves so that the compositions could be set up using physical bricks and run through a large press in the UIC print lab. The process involved over 8,000 bricks and more than 27,000 hand-operated printing passes that took Neves and his students eight months to complete.
The exhibition at Design Museum of Chicago displays the original LEGO letterform constructions alongside their letterpress prints. Plan your visit on the museum’s website, and see more of Neves’ work on Instagram and his website, where he has shared extensive open-source information about the project.
You might also enjoy Roy Scholten’s LEGO letterpress birds.
