On social media, topics with labels such as ‘LEGO Home’ and ‘LEGO Home Decoration’ all have a high amount of discussion.
LEGO on the wall, LEGO storage, LEGO display cabinets ...... a small LEGO block particles, has become a popular new way to play in the home decoration world.
In addition, the LEGO style that has taken the home decorating world by storm has quietly scraped into offline retail spaces.
For example, Taichung's 7-Eleven ‘Yicheng store’, using LEGOs as a creative idea, not only the appearance of colourful LEGOs, the shop's dining area also has a whole wall of colourful blocks to hit.
The lounge area also has a special glass display case, which is regularly changed with different Lego exhibits, and even the sign in the washroom is made of Lego.
Of course, the concept of LEGO style is not necessarily limited to the building blocks themselves.
Deconstructing the LEGO style from a visual and design point of view, we can see that one of its major characteristics is ‘pixelation’.
Pixel art on the comeback
The word pixel means an element of an image and is one of the smallest units that make up a pattern.
If an image is a living thing, then a pixel is one of the ‘cells’ in it.
This graphic art, created by drawing individual pixels (1px) using the dot-matrix principle, is the defining characteristic of the LEGO style.
A Lego block is equivalent to a grid of small pixel dots, the basic unit of the image. Therefore, the so-called LEGO style is essentially a pixelated style, i.e. ‘pixel style’.
When mentioning the pixel style, the first thing that comes to the mind of many people is the classic game labels on it.
Popular classic games such as Super Mario, King of Fighters and Contra, which swept through a generation, used pixel by pixel to fill in the picture effect and build up the imaginative ‘secondary world’ of that era.
However, the pixelated squares of video games are only the specific expression of the pixel style in a certain period of time and under a certain technical condition.
Strictly speaking, even the finest bitmap is composed of pixels, for example, mosaic, cross-stitch, LED light sign ...... are all a kind of pixel art.
Therefore, the origin of the pixel style can actually be traced back to some time-honoured traditional art forms.
For example, Mosaic, the European art of mosaic tessellation, uses brightly coloured pebbles, shells, tiles and other materials to assemble images to decorate the walls of buildings.
In the field of design, this pixel art forms a special kind of popular trend, which lingers between the retro trend and stands in the age of high-definition pursuits.
For example, CryptoPunk's NFT avatars that were sold at high prices, Coca-Cola's new ‘Zero Sugar Bytes’ meta-cosmic cola design, LOEWE's ‘pixel-inspired’ clothing, and so on.
From the game world to reality
From video games to graphic design, ‘pixel style’ has long since escaped the confines of games and entered real life, and has slowly been labelled as childhood, sentimentality, and even imagination.
In the field of design, the reason why ‘Pixel Style’ is so enduring is not only because of the generation's affection for classic games, but also because of its own charm.
Firstly, pixels often represent retro.Since the days of childhood game consoles, pixelated modules with jagged edges have become a form of expression with a nostalgic touch.
Retail spaces use the nostalgia and childishness of the pixel itself to maximise the empathy effect in the crowd, thus increasing goodwill towards the product and strengthening identification with the brand.
Secondly, pixels have the characteristic of graphic symbolisation.
Pixel graphics have clear lines and contours, strong colour contrasts, and do not depict too many details, only retaining prominent features.
This is also exactly in line with the aesthetic characteristics of today's digital age where people pursue simplicity, visual impact and intuition.
Finally, pixels have a sense of control and order.The size of each colour block is fixed, so you don't have to worry about the dots being too big or too small, and the designer only needs to place and combine the colour blocks according to his own needs, in order to connect various lines and surfaces.
This feature gives the pixel itself a strong sense of order and control.
From a psychological point of view, the more orderly and controllable the information, the higher the fluency, and the workload of the brain in processing the information will be reduced accordingly, making people feel comfortable and happy.
In short, the combination of emotional retro nostalgia, visual simplicity and order, and psychological comfort and pleasure has contributed to the popularity of ‘pixel style’ in retail spaces.