Shipped and thankful

by John Tolva on November 28, 2011

We hope our customers in America had a great Thanksgiving weekend. We're certainly thankful, because our first orders are now shipping! We spent much of the break assembling what we hope will make perfect holiday gifts.


We're also thankful for a very specialized Lego piece -- a tool really -- that gets us out of a bind when we screw up. Not sure what it is called, but it is a lever for removing the tough-to-unseat 1x1 lego bricks that make up our mosaics.  We used it quite a bit in the creation of the mosaic above when we realized that Dad had messed up the initial pixel grid. (Thanks a lot, Dad! :-)


Promotion

by John Tolva on November 27, 2011

 As with everything, we aim high but model first. Here's what our downtown billboard will look like one day.


Behind the scenes at The Brick Brothers

by Shopify on June 25, 2011

On the eve of launching the business we thought we'd take a moment to tell you a bit about how the mosaics get made. It's part high tech, part precise manual labor. 

Once a photo from a customer arrives we use the computer to reduce the number of colors to six shades of gray. Then create a grid of squares, one color per. There's a bit of experimenting at this stage as we try different ways of representing the colors in the image for the best mosaic. When we're satisfied we print out the grid and a line-by-line inventory of the pieces needed (as a way to double-check that we eyeball the colors correctly.)

Then the real work begins. Using our stock of 1x1 bricks we snap things into place. It's a lot like color-by-numbers. Then we package it up and ship it to you!

Here's an example of us creating a mosaic of our little sister. Our Brick Sis, you could say.



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