HP Indigo digital press in Lego

Written by Colin Gillman | 09 February 2012

Back in the days when a father wanted to steer his child on a career path toward the printing industry he might, as did my father, present the child with greatest gift of all – a John Bull Printing Outfit.

The Victoria & Albert Museum describes the John Bull Printing Outfit as ‘a printing set popular with children in the early to mid 20th century. Its simple design made it easy to stamp short sentences by using the tweezers to insert the little rubber letters into the wooden blocks. The tiny rubber letters would be easily lost, however!’

These days digital printing has surpassed letterpress as a means of printing and even a simple child’s toy has seemingly gone the same way. Welcome to the 21st Century John Bull, here’s your very own HP Indigo digital press made of Lego.

This Lego set was from the now defunct Lego ‘Design by Me’ customisation service which Lego pulled the plug on due to quality control issues. A spokesperson for Lego said: “The Design by Me experience has struggled to live up to the quality standards for a LEGO service. The feedback from Design by Me users has taught us that we would need to rebuild the entire setup of Design by Me to fix this. This would only make the service too expensive.”

Shame, I wanted to design a wide format model for my kids to build this Christmas. Now they will have to put up with a John Bull letterpress outfit from eBay instead.

www.designbyme.lego.com