Remember Boing Boing Gadgets contributor Joel Johnston’s Nine Sets I Have Known and Loved?
Something rather beautiful happened in the comments on that post — a connection between Joel and Bjarne P. Tveskov, one of the LEGO designers who worked on Classic Space sets in the 1980s.
Bjarne designed many of the sets we all know and love from the 80s:
BB Gadgets: What did designing kits for LEGO entail back in ’80s?
Bjarne: My LEGO career started when I was 17 years old; I saw an ad in the Sunday newspaper…. when suddenly I was offered the job I had to ask my parents if it was OK if I quit high-school to become a Spaceship designer.
Read the rest of Joel’s excellent interview with Bjarne on BB Gadgets.
That’s too cool. I find it especially interesting the similarities between his story and Mark Sandlin’s and Ben Ellermann’s stories of their time working with the Billund designers–how they have to cut parts from the set, and make sure they’re kid-friendly. Looks like not a lot has changed in 20 years!
Haha, last night I took a bunch of pictures of some of those sets and threw them on my Flickr page. Weird. http://www.flickr.com/photos/bosta/sets/72157603892282174/