True Colors · World Champs BCN

TRUE COLORS · 75 years of LEGO, one color at a time

Back for my second run at this championship — and this time I wanted to tell a real story, not just build charts. 📈

So here it is: LEGO's palette as what it actually is, a business story. From 3 colors in 1950 to 113 in 2004 — right as the company nearly went bankrupt — and then a purge that wiped out dozens in three years. Today the rainbow is wider than ever, yet half of every brick is still black, white or gray.

A bit of what's under the hood, for the curious: official Rebrickable data, a model stitched together with Power Query and DAX, and three little Deneb (Vega-Lite) pieces I'm proud of — the 273-bar barcode that breathes when you hover, the purge graveyard, and the neutral waffle. The idea that guided the whole thing: a toy deserves a report you can actually play with. It tells the story on its own if you just read it, but there's twice as much waiting if you start clicking.

And I cared about accessibility for real, not as a box to tick: alt text everywhere (some of it dynamic — the brick card literally narrates itself), reading order that matches how your eye moves, contrast checked properly and measured (up to 16:1 on the main ink), grays you can tell apart by lightness and not just hue, and a searchable table in the epilogue as a text fallback.

Full disclosure: I finished this in the small hours, jumping around my living room, because Spain just won the World Cup! ⚽
If the file opens a little euphoric tonight, well… now you know why.

Thanks for reading, and for having me back. 🏆

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