Materials: Ramvik
Description: When I moved in I bought an IKEA Ramvik table and while travelling this summer I had an idea (don't ask why): decorate its top with Lego bricks used as pixels. Here are the steps I went through. If you don't care about those steps and want to see a nice time-lapse video, scroll to the end of the article!
Lego bricks
First things first. What are the Lego brick sizes and colors available? Oddly enough this question is not that easily answered. Probably because Lego's site is crappy, or because nobody really cares... I eventually found Brickipedia which happens to be a much richer resource than the official ones. Everything I was looking for was there: the Lego "unit" is 8 millimeters and the color palette is pretty simple.
Table specs
Knowing my table size I had various options, depending on the "pixel size" I'd choose. Of course the number of bricks (and the price) would also vary. So I created a dynamic spreadsheet on Google Docs that'd do the calculations for me...
I chose the 4x4 option, quite cheap and still offering a cool number of pixels.
Design
36x16 pixels of freedom, that's it. I tried lots of different designs, from lo-fi photos to pixel-art drawings. I decided to go for a Heavy Oblique Futura.
Looking good.
The Lego palette
I set my type to white, on a black background. The anti-aliasing process creates gray-scale pixels to smooth the curves, which is great, but Lego bricks aren't available in all colors! To have a realistic preview of what it would look like I had to create a Photoshop Color Table matching Lego's gray-scales.
You may notice that Lego's black is a little bit light and the grays are yellowish.
Time to order bricks!
Already? Nope, not that fast. Before ordering I had to know exactly what to order, that means counting the pixels. Well, I'm not this kind of guy. I'm a developer; I hate repetitive chores, you know.
So I fired up Flash Builder and came up with PaletteCounter a simple, OpenSource, app to count pixels of each color. I also added some kind of "assembly instructions generator" to help us build it. Handy.
Time to order!
Really? Yup. I placed an order on lego.com's Pick A Brick and received it a couple of weeks later. Yay!
Let's do this
I'm not going to describe the process (that happened this saturday), just have a look at this time-lapse vid. 1020 pics shot in about an hour, yummy.
See more of the Lego table .
~ Quentin, Bordeaux, France
Instant get.
ReplyDeletethat is freakin awesome. very creative.
ReplyDeleteI might have picked a different word, but overall, top notch.
Anything with lego is cool.
love it!
ReplyDeleteSo awesome!
ReplyDeletethis is awesome!
ReplyDeleteSure awesome.....but....how do you clean it properly? Spilled coffee, rest of a meal, wine, cadlewax.....
ReplyDeleteWould it not be better to take the briks on its side????
we have this coffee table, there's a glass cover that comes with it, i'd assume it is used to cover over the lego tiles
ReplyDeleteThis is a superb, very skillful hack! Well done!
ReplyDeleteI have the same table and I really love how you can put whatever you like underneath the glass surface and change it. However, it doesn't really have space enough for 8 mm of lego, more like..for a paper (and some crumbs.. maybe).
Is the glass 'floating' on top of the legos or how do you deal with the space in between?
It kinda looks like they used the flat ones (in the lego shop they are listed as plates I think). They are much thinner, more like the big tiles you build you lego on.
ReplyDeleteThis is awesome!
wow wow wow!
ReplyDeletexx
I actually like that you could then use this table as a baseboard for building on.
ReplyDeleteWhat did you lay down before starting to build the lego part? - the stuff you roll out in the video.
ReplyDeleteat about 41 seconds into the video you can see them put the glass top of the table on.
ReplyDeletelove love love it!
ReplyDelete