How do LEGO designers get to work on new sets like 10356 Star Trek Enterprise? How do they begin their creative process? The professional creatives behind the nostalgic new Icons set open up about their experience getting to build one of sci-fi’s most iconic ships.
Senior Model Designer Hans Schlömer and Graphic Design Manager Crystal Fontan discuss how they joined Starfleet to work on the latest LEGO Icons set – 10356 Star Trek Enterprise, based on the ship’s appearance in Star Trek: The Next Generation television series.
The 3,600-piece set will launch on November 28 and if you buy it over the Black Friday weekend, you will get 40768 Type-15 Shuttlepod for free.
Ordinarily, designers are selected from the team to work on a LEGO set. But with LEGO Icons having a much more diverse portfolio of licenses and models, and with news of the Star Trek deal spreading quickly within the LEGO Group, there came the opportunity for Hans and Crystal to work on a set inspired by of their favourite franchises. But it still took a bit of effort for both of them to land their dream assignment.
“I wasn’t on the project to start. Then our project manager, who also still has time to design a little bit, swooped in, being a little bit of a Star Trek fan and took over the project. Do I have to push him under a bus or something? How do I get assigned to that?” Hans jokes. “But the truth is, as a project manager, you don’t really have time for a model like this. So I let everybody know that I’m here and willing to help should it be necessary. And it became necessary really quickly. So I was assigned lead designer and the rest is history. Then we had to get Crystal in, which was much easier than I thought.”
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“Yeah, there aren’t any Trekkies in the graphic design team,” Crystal adds. “I did have to, I wouldn’t say beg, but I had to do my due diligence because I’m the graphic designer for LEGO Gaming. So this would take some of my time. I had to plead that this is a passion project. And then I just went down to the graphic design team like, ‘hey, I heard y’all are doing the Enterprise. Can I get on there?’ So I lucked out that there are no Trekkies around in graphic design.”
But the work to get assigned to the project was only the first step — both Hans and Crystal then had to do a fair bit of research and preparation to ensure the model and minifigures would be as accurate as possible.
“The Next Generation is a comfort show for me, so I always have it on loop. I watch it over and over again,” laughs Crystal. “But then we were talking to Paramount, our IP partner, and they were very, very excited, too. They gave us a bunch of style guides that helped us. Hans had one that was a 1:1 schematic of the whole entire ship. So he kept referencing that schematic to make sure we were doing things [accurately].
“And we were breaking boundaries here and there with graphics, especially the deflector dish, which was really, really hard to make. Even though it looks simple, it wasn’t — I’ll tell you that. So it was a lot of back and forth types of homework during the whole process.”
“The ship, the design, is so well documented,” Hans adds. “But not every iteration. The ship changed with every season, swapping to different sizes of studio models, and at one point they swapped to CGI. We had to decide which version, which surface detail we wanted to go with. It was especially important to me, as I said, as a TNG fan that I got to be the designer and got to choose.”
With the iteration of the Enterprise settled on, Hans could then start building the model itself — a task that is much easier said than done. Determining the scale of the model was a major first step and while the dish is perhaps the ship’s flashiest feature, it actually wasn’t what ultimately decided the scale.
“We had a sketch model, which I then kept developing further, and there wasn’t much of the dish there yet. So the starting point was not the dish, as one would suspect, being the most difficult part of designing the ship. It was actually the engines,” Hans says. “They defined the size and the scale of the engineering hull, then the dish was last for quite a while. I remember that we had to rescale at one point, though, once we had a definite scale on the dish. It was maybe a little smaller than originally intended, but not by much.”
With the source material clearly laid out and the scale of the model determined, Hans and Crystal were free to dive into all the intricate details of the ship and minifigures, turning rough sketches into a model worthy of being the first ever LEGO Star Trek set.
Hans and Crystal also talk about the process of designing the minifigures for the set, as well as figuring out how to ensure the ship itself was sturdy enough to withstand adventures deep in outer space.
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