Summary
The BrickLink Designer Program (BDP) 2021 Invitational is the follow-up to the AFOL Designer Program (ADP) that first launched in 2018. For this 2021 Invitational, the BrickLink team and invited designers of the LEGO Ideas 10K Club projects collaborated to test build and refine the projects for production. Fifteen projects over the course of 3 rounds were crowdfunded and produced.
My role
The art direction for the BDP 2021 Invitational was partly based off of existing designs from ADP. We believed having a similar identity to the previous program was important to establish familiarity. Still, new assets to refresh the brand were required. Some print and digital deliverables include:
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New logo
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Packaging and inserts
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PDF instructions
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Landing and item details pages
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Copywriting and proofreading
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Marketing materials
Constraints and challenges
BDP 2021 Invitational had no dedicated resources to effectively cover all requirements and deliverables. Many of the team members who worked on this were pulled in from other teams which meant switching between tasks, priorities, and stakeholders caused confusion and oversight.
Other challenges include coordinating schedules with manufacturing and communicating with external parties in a different time zone. Since this project had a timeline of approximately one year, there was pressure from stakeholders and our users to get tasks done quickly without sacrificing product quality.
Outcomes and learnings
We initially planned for only 5,000 units per project, but we doubled it to 10,000 units due to high demand. The first round of crowdfunding sold out within a few days. The second round of crowdfunding reached funded status in under 1 hour, and the third round completely sold out in under 24 hours.
We didn’t anticipate the projects to sell out as fast as it did, so there were some in-between statuses that we didn’t account for. Of the 15 projects that were crowdfunded and produced, 9 completely sold out. Through BDP 2021 Invitational, we learned that the interest in this type of crowdfunding was high enough to continue with a new and improved program, now called BDP Series 1.
Articles by fan media
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Round 1 Final Designs – The Brick Blogger
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Round 2 Final Set Images – The Brick Fan
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Round 3 Has Closed – Jay's Brick Blog