Should Lego sets have the designer's names printed on them?

[badbob001]

Knowing the designers would essentially give us access to each designer's portfolio/resume. It would be interesting to see how their designs changed over time and see how much influence they have with set designs overall.

The only designer that comes to mind that is sort of famous is Jamie Berard, but perhaps that is only because I really like the Modular Building series that he started. Here is a list of most of his sets: http://www.brickset.com/brickLists/?8900

I would love to know the people responsible for some of the more notoriously bad and slapped-together looking sets and see they got better or if they are even still employed at LEGO. It's amazing how LEGO is more than 60 years old and only in the last decade did the overall designs get more serious (City seems to have maintained a higher standard throughout). I wonder if ties in with a major revamp of their designers hiring process (looks pretty tough from a recent article).

Ahem:

Compared with:

Apart from videos and little easter egg initials, it's pretty rare for a LEGO set to list the designer. I only have the Back to the Future Cuusoo set, but the instruction book lists the designer. Is it the same with the other Cuusoo sets?

[fred67]

It wouldn't bother me, but unlike movies, books (including comic books), you generally get to see the whole thing in it's entirety before buying... you either like it or don't. Why should who designed it change that, or even influence... even just a bit... whether or not it's a set you like?

[Aanchir]

I would love to know the people responsible for some of the more notoriously bad and slapped-together looking sets and see they got better or if they are even still employed at LEGO. It's amazing how LEGO is more than 60 years old and only in the last decade did the overall designs get more serious (City seems to have maintained a higher standard throughout). I wonder if ties in with a major revamp of their designers hiring process (looks pretty tough from a recent article).

Ahem:

http://www.1000steine.com/brickset/images/7161-1.jpg

Compared with:

http://www.1000steine.com/brickset/images/9499-1.jpg

Let's be fair here — the Gungan Sub set was pretty good for its time. It resembled the subject and had decent play features, even if those were not derived from the source material. A lot of the parts used in the more recent model were not available at the time of the original, and a lot of the building techniques used in the more recent one are rare even in today's sets — I can only imagine they'd have been discouraged at a time when the feeling was that younger kids were the main audience for the LEGO brand and that the level of complexity they could tolerate was much lower. Basically the designers were working with a faulty understanding of the audience that they were (or ought to have been) targeting.

Some well-known designers these days are those who also have a presence in the AFOL community, like Mark Stafford, Adrian Florea, Adam Grabowski, Tim Ainley, and Marcos Bessa. Naturally, most of these designers started working in the past decade — the AFOL community didn't exist in nearly the same capacity before the Internet, after all.

Another very important designer is Torben Skov. He's been working with the LEGO Group for over 25 years. One of his notable early achievements is that he is the creator of the ubiquitous Octan brand. He has designed for all kinds of themes — one of his recent models is Equila's Ultra Striker from LEGO Legends of Chima.

Christoffer Raundahl is a long-time designer I greatly admire whose main involvement has been in constraction themes. He's been working on them since the beginning — so he's credited as the inventor on patent drawings for Slizer/Throwbots parts as well as for the new Hero Factory "character and creature building system" introduced in 2011.

Astrid Graabaek primarily designs for the Creator and Friends themes. She's one of the designers whom I've been fortunate enough to meet in person, at Brickfair 2012. She was the designer for 10224 Town Hall and one of the designers for Palace Cinema.

Henrik Andersen is most well-known as a designer for LEGO City. Any model with a license plate that has an "HA" on it is probably one of his. Another City designer is Pierre Normandin, and his sets can be identified in a similar fashion.

Overall, these kind of details fascinate me and I wish there were one place you could reference to find out all of them! That's part of why I'd prefer a web-based resource to simply having the designers' names on the packages or instruction booklets. It'd make this kind of thing much less of a scavenger hunt.

[meyerc13]

This came up on the Brickset forum, and Mark Stafford gave his opinion why this won't work. See his reply here: http://www.bricksetforum.com/discussion/comment/11837/#Comment_11837