How Lego bricks went from five colors to nearly 200

Since modern Lego bricks debuted in 1958, their color scheme has undergone a transformation from just a handful to more than 110 at the peak in 2004. The palette has evolved, grown and shrunk over the decades.

When Lego started manufacturing bricks, it started small, colorwise. “These were very basic colors,” said Signe Weise, a corporate historian at Lego. The original brick colors, according to Weise, were red, yellow, blue, white and transparent.

Lego brick colors in 1958

If you counted every brick produced since 1958, most would be black, gray or white, but such a census obscures the colorful history of the palette. Using data from Rebrickable, a site that crowdsources information about Lego sets, The Washington Post analyzed the palette to explore what the color system says about the evolution of the company.

Jared Hinton, a Los Angeles-based site administrator for Rebrickable, has worked for more than five years helping to carefully catalogue and maintain the data.

If you counted every brick produced since 1958, most would be black, gray or white, but such a census obscures the colorful history of the palette. Using data from Rebrickable, a site that crowdsources information about Lego sets, The Washington Post analyzed the palette to explore what the color system says about the evolution of the company.

Jared Hinton, a Los Angeles-based site administrator for Rebrickable, has worked for more than five years helping to carefully catalogue and maintain the data.

“As the internet and interest in Lego colors has grown, so has our ability to preserve this information and create more accurate inventories,” Hinton said.

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