January 2025 LEGO News Roundup

This month, I’m reflecting on 2024, highlighting a glaring error of scale, and exploring a LEGO Ideas set with an architectural pedigree…

Scale Matters!

This month, I want to highlight a ‘free’ product that The LEGO Group created which really missed the mark. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the LEGO Modular Building Series, they created a poster that you can download and print for free, or set as the desktop background of your computer.

When LEGO sets are shown next to each other, it is fair to assume that they are displayed at the same scale, meaning that the relative size of the illustrations would match the relative size of the real models. This is unfortunately very far from the truth.

I measured the width of all of the building so you can see how inconsistent they are.

I measured the width of all of the building so you can see how inconsistent they are.

I’ve highlighted the most extreme error I could find on the poster: #10224 Town Hall (2012) versus #10243 Parisian Restauraunt (2014). Because they are both built on a 32-stud wide baseplate, the illustrations should have been the same width. Instead, I found that the Parisian Restauraunt is 70% larger than the Town Hall — That’s a big difference in scale!

Adjusting for scale shows how much taller the Town Hall is than other sets in the series.

Adjusting for scale shows how much taller the Town Hall is than other sets in the series.

There are two possible explanations here: 1) A graphic designer made this poster quickly and decided to make all of the buildings about the same height without considering their scale, or 2) a deliberate decision to prevent fans from realizing how much shorter some of the current sets are than some of the earlier models.

Acknowledging that The LEGO Group has been slowly increasing prices alongside a shift to using tons of tiny parts to inflate part counts, I can’t rule out the possiblity that this was a deliberate choice to mislead fans.

I edited this image on 2025/02/01 to use Parisian Restauraunt instead of Boutique Hotel to illustrate this issue, since Boutique Hotel is a corner modular and the image was taken from an angle.

New at Brick Architect

This month, I did not launch any new features for the LEGO Parts Guide. Instead, I made changes behind-the-scenes to make it easier to add parts and maintain the database.

Notably, I added custom images for about 330 parts, and added 280 parts to the database. This ensured that all of the top 2000 current parts (with custom images) have been added to the database correctly with custom names (that work well as labels) and are sorted into appropriate categories.

Chart showing how most of the top 2000 parts have been fully integrated into the database and have custom images.

Chart showing how most of the top 2000 parts have been fully integrated into the database and have custom images.

This chart of ‘current’ parts shows how the majority of the top 2000 current parts have been added to the database and have custom images (Green). Yellow represents parts that have custom images but do not yet have a custom name or appear sorted by category, and Gray indicates parts without a 3d model in LDraw and thusly do not have a custom image within the LEGO Parts Guide either.

If you want to show your support for the project and see behind-the-scenes insights about how the LEGO Parts Guide and LEGO Brick Labels are created, please consider becoming a Patron — It helps motivate me to keep making these resouces even better, and I’m working on some patron-exclusive resources that I will share soon.

A few of the things I shared with patrons this month: A video showing how I rearrange parts in the admin mode, additional charts looking at parts from all years, and some of the backend tools I’ve created to maintain the database.

Explore the entire 2024 Animal Crossing Lineup in this awesome collection of mini-reviews!

Explore the entire 2024 Animal Crossing Lineup in this awesome collection of mini-reviews!

I also want to highlight a great article by Koen that offers a closer look at all eight Animal Crossing sets released in 2024. They really are cute — harking back to the playful and colorful style of early 80’s LEGO Fabuland sets.

February 2025 releases for AFOLs

After a ton of new releases in January, we only have a few new sets for February. This tends to be a quiet month, and we’ve already learned about some interesting sets for March like #21062 Trevi Fountain (LEGO Architecture) and #10362 French Café.

  • #21354 Twilight: The Cullen House
    While the primary appeal will be fans of the popular book and movie franchise, I would be remiss to not point out that this is an architecturally interesting model based on a real home near Portland, Oregon. I think we will find it on the outskirts of many LEGO Town Plans in the years to come…
    2001 pieces, ages 18+, $220, available now at LEGO.com
  • #10345 Flower Arrangement
    Like previous additions to the LEGO Botanicals collection, this bouquet and brick-built vase is beautiful, but at about $0.10 per piece it offers a worse value than we typically see in this unlicensed theme. 1161 pieces, ages 18+, $110, available now at LEGO.com
#21354 Twilight: The Cullen House will be the most exciting new set for many adult builders.

#21354 Twilight: The Cullen House will be the most exciting new set for many adult builders.

Even though it won’t be released until March 1, you can already preorder #21062 Trevi Fountain (LEGO Architecture) — it’s 1880 pieces, ages 18+, $160, preorder now at LEGO.com

You can explore all of the new releases by visiting the lego.com store. (Making a purchase using our referral link helps support this website.)

Reflecting on 2024

A popular question amongst the adult LEGO fan community is how fast our hobby is growing – taking into account folks who move away from the hobby and people who are new to it. It’s well established that the combination of more products aimed at adult builders and the pressures of the early pandemic made 2020 and 2021 huge growth years for the LEGO fan community.

This bears out in the data from established LEGO websites. Rebrickable saw about 75% growth in 2020, and 30% in 2021-2023. 2024 does appear to have flattened out, but it is possible that changes in how Google Analytics reports page views and increased use of ad blockers may be pushing these figures lower. The Brick Fan also rose sharply in 2021, and saw a 15% drop in traffic this year. They were also unsure if this is a genuine drop or due to changes in Google Analytics.

Rebrickable also shared information about sets, parts, and custom MOCs added to their website in 2024. Of particular note, they continue to add 4,000 parts to their database per year, although that is down from a high of over 8,000 in 2021. While this is a huge number, it includes both new moulds and new printed parts for 2024, as well as older parts which were discovered and manually added to the database this year.

By contrast, BrickNerd still managed a 30% increase in 2024 likely due to their continued investment in awesome articles almost every day. Their annual report (like their website) focused on the diverse global perspectives represented on the site, including the many countries where contributing authors live!

I am also happy to report that Brick Architect also had a great year, with a roughly 10% increase in traffic when I exclude the brand new LEGO Parts Guide. It is being tracked separately from the rest of the site but already receives about 2/3 compared to the number of pageviews for the main site, despite only 1/5 of the number of visitors. (The interactive nature of the Parts Guide results in a lot more pageviews per user on average.)

On the balance, I suspect the hobby continues to grow slowly, although the majority of new fans are probably engage with LEGO-related photo and video content on YouTube or TikTok. For my part, I’m happy to continue creating longform written content and online resources to support a diverse global LEGO community!

Best articles from around the web

Learn more about the LEGO hobby with a freshselection of great articles from around the web every month…

Long story short, the [house in the] movie changes ever-so-slightly in every single film … So it was an interesting challenge to capture the essence in the details, while remaining faithful to the film franchise.

Laura Perron

Benedek Lampert prepares to photograph LEGO minifigures in a dynamic winter scene. (Photo: Brothers Brick)

Benedek Lampert prepares to photograph LEGO minifigures in a dynamic winter scene. (Photo: Brothers Brick)



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