Subject:
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Re: LEGO brickpedia options
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Sun, 11 Dec 2005 19:54:03 GMT
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Viewed:
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3162 times
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Hi Ben,
In lugnet.general, Ben Fleskes wrote:
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I’ve enjoyed looking through Allan Bedfords ‘Unnofficial LEGO Builders Guide’
and browsing his brickopedia.
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I hope you don’t mind if I join in this conversation. As you can probably
imagine, this is a topic to which I’ve given a lot of thought over the last
couple of years. :)
A quick bit of background on the Brickopedia that appears in my book. The idea
of creating that section (a visual reference guide of LEGO elements) predates
the idea of the overall book by about a year or so. It was a very personal
project, in that I really only wanted the parts gathered together and printed
out so that I could easily use the guide when planning and building offline.
Initially it was to have blank areas near each part to jot down notes on uses I
had found for particular pieces or to indicate which parts I needed to order
more of.
I sat on the idea for a while but as I began to realize I wanted to write an
entire LEGO-related book I thought the Brickopedia would make a good foundation.
In fact, the original title of the book was to be, “The LEGO Builder’s Reference
Guide.” It was going to be much more textbook-like in that it would have
gathered building tips and techniques together and assumed a level of existing
knowledge and skill possessed by the reader. This idea morphed into more of a
field guide starting with, “what is a brick, what is a plate.... etc.” right up
to and including designing your own models. More than one person has since
described it as a ‘Zen-like approach’ to the LEGO system and I’m not inclined
to disagree. :)
The Brickopedia itself was obviously the largest and most time consuming section
of the book. I jokingly refer to Appendix A as, “how I spent my summer of
2004.” It was more than 6 weeks of work, not including the preplanning that had
already been done. Each of the nearly 300 elements was rendered as a 2300 x
1700 greyscale image. Each of those files was more than 10 meg before cropping
and resizing. Packing them up and sending them off to No Starch Press was, to be
honest, tedious at best.
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I also enjoy browsing Peeron part inventories.
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One other reference that I was inspired by was the Partsref feature of LUGNET.
For example:
http://guide.lugnet.com/partsref/brick/
And also the Bricktionary project which seems to have begun in earnest but lost
some steam over time:
http://news.lugnet.com/db/brictionary/
**Incidentally, the Brickopedia started out life being called the
‘Bricktionary’. I was completely unaware of the project that
had started on LUGNET when I was first laying out the sections
of the book. Once I realized I’d used a name that had already
existed I changed it to what it is today.
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But I’m looking for more.
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Completely understandable. Despite what several reviewers of ULBG have said,
the Brickopedia obviously does not contain all of the elements ever produced
by LEGO... not by a long shot.
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In a dream world, I’d like to have:
A printed publication (because I like to browse books and feel paper in my
hand)
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As you can likely imagine... I totally agree with your feelings on printed
materials. :)
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Something with images of parts such that:
All parts are shown close to lifesize and shown in correct relative size. (ie
a 1x1 brick should occupy about 1/16 the space of a 1x16 brick).
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If you look at the link to Partsref above, I think they’ve used the scaling you
discuss here. For me it was a very difficult choice. While I knew that some
people would want that style my objective was to try and present each element in
the best possible light. So the decision was made to allow each element to fill
as much of the space as available, though the final layout of the book allowed
some to grow more than others. In the end there was not a single scale used to
present the images, but rather things were simply made to ‘look’ as good as
possible. I credit Riley Hoffman (the Compositor at No Starch Press) with
making the Brickopedia (and all of ULBG) look as nice as it does. I’m a bit
biased, I know, but I really think she did a great job.
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There is a reference to alternate names and identifications to the part. For
example - is it a jumper or a 1/2 stud offset plate. Or a washing machine
brick of a 1x1 with side stud? Different people use different names.
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This was a HUGE issue for me. I wrestled with many iterations of not only part
names, but also part categories.
First the part names. You’re absolutely right, different people use different
names. I think some of this is regionalized and some is just how people perceive
a part. For example, I see the 1x2 plates as ‘offsetting’ the next brick from
the one below it. I don’t see it ‘jumping’ anything. Thus my decision of which
to use. I also see the 1x1 as looking more like an antique headlight from a
car, not a washing machine. I use a topload washer so maybe that’s why I see it
that way. :)
Here are a couple of discussions on part naming:
http://news.lugnet.com/general/?n=41997
http://news.lugnet.com/market/shopping/?n=12225
The categories was an even bigger struggle for me. First, I knew I wasn’t
including every single part, thus didn’t need as many categories as some other
sites/systems use. I was also going to shuffle a few parts from one category to
another. And so on. In the end I tried to make it simple, usable and suitable
to the book. I think it works in that context but not really outside of it.
The way the Brickopedia is structured isn’t really scalable but will hopefully
suffice for a while.
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I’d like a sticker set, that has a pictures of various parts so I can put the
stickers on the storage bins (currently I’m trying out an idea where I put
small baseplates on the fronts of my bins with double stick tape, and put a
sampling of the parts in that bin on the baseplate).
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I’ve thought about taking some of my part images created for the book and simply
printing them on label paper right using my inkjet printer. Only thing stopping
me right now is lack of time to putter around with it. But I hear your desire
for such labels. It would be wild if someone actually created that for
distribution.
I’m glad you did. I hope I haven’t yammered on too much in my reply. I tend to
get a bit wordy when I get on a topic that really interests me. :)
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I’ve heard rumors of internal LEGO catalogs that have black and white drawings
of different pieces and the indentifiers that LEGO uses internally. Maybe
LEGO could make a non proprietery version available...
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It would be interesting to know more about that if it exists.
I’d love to hear more of your thoughts Ben, or from anyone else interested in
this subject!
All the best,
Allan B.
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: LEGO brickpedia options
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| (...) It's been done. . . (URL) to personalize it for our own use we'd have to be able to edit CorelDraw files, and maybe use LDraw tools. Come to think of it, I thought that Bob Kojima's PartsCatalog (URL) make labels, but I can't figure out how to (...) (19 years ago, 11-Dec-05, to lugnet.general, lugnet.storage)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | LEGO brickpedia options
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| I've enjoyed looking through Allan Bedfords 'Unnofficial LEGO Builders Guide' and browsing his brickopedia. I also enjoy browsing Peeron part inventories. But I'm looking for more. In a dream world, I'd like to have: A printed publication (because I (...) (19 years ago, 9-Dec-05, to lugnet.general)
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