Fontsleuth: Lego instructions from the 1970s?

Maurice Meilleur

Thomas Phinney, call your office:

Lego's egalitarian instructions from the 1970s

Stephen Coles

The typesetting is weird, but the spirit of the copy is certainly in keeping with LEGO ads from 1980–82.

Maurice Meilleur

Evidence and opinions are converging on 'legit', apparently. And Stephen, that is one of my favorite ads ever.

Thomas Phinney

Times was not unusual in ads of the period. The version of the Lego logo shown was used from 1972-1998 (the current logo is just slightly tweaked from that one).

There is nothing about it that seems out of period to me, aside from the gender-progressive sentiment. But they are a Scandinavian company, and circa 1974 was a high-water point for such thinking.

Nick Shinn

Gender-progressive ideology is typical of the era. For instance, it was a time of unisex fashion (not perhaps for the majority, but a strong trend), in the UK and North America as well as Scandinavia. This from 1976:



Like that /t in Simplicity?

Mark Simonson

One of the baffling things for me as I've gotten older, having come of age in that era, is how much certain things have regressed culturally. You imagine that trends will keep going in the same direction, but they don't always.

Nick Shinn

One thing remains constant: it’s hard to kill the undead (Helvetica).

Craig Eliason

A summary of the case at Medium.

Stephen Coles

The tl;dr version of that ridiculously in-depth post: “There were several good arguments for questioning the photo of the ‘LEGO letter to parents’. They just all happened to be mistaken.”

Thomas Phinney

Some of those supposedly good arguments, weren't.