8 years later...

[Eilif]

As we all know, in 2003, LEGO introduced it's new versions of grey, light grey and brown. LEGO had added new colors in the past and would continue to do so in the future, but these were different because they replaced the existing colors rather than simply supplementing the LEGO plalete.

Much rhetorical blood was spilt, some folks left the hobby, and it was a major topic of discussion for some years. now that 8 years have passed the "new" colors are the standard, and I'm curious...

What place do the old colors have in your collection and MOCing?

Please note: I realize that this may still be a bit of a sore spot for some folks, but please keep the "color rants" down to a minimum. This topic is about current use, and there are plenty of other places where you can read about color-change-rage.

[Mythos]

Me I adjusted to the new colors cause since the retired colors will become harder and harder to find over time, but on the other hand I will use old colors if I need a differant shading to my structure then the new color or to offset the new colors.

this whole new/old color debate is just hype plain and simple, LEGO changed the colors, get over it and use what is available is my motto.

[Saint]

I adjusted . ( big fat unhappy point )

I do build in bley, but I keep my old and new as separate as possible. Currently I'm in the process of rebuilding / adding stuff to my CCT , but that's all done in bley. I keep the classic grey for other MOC's and sorts. And I try not to mix them,

They look terrible next to each other .

Also I build more with Tan and green, I want to focus more on the landscape's and such, so the grey and bley I have isn't growing that much at this time . I keep collecting my SW and other LEGO because it's my hobby

Grtz Saint

[pinioncorp]

While I've been at collecting for only a short time, I really find that I prefer the older colours, namely the greys, better then the new ones. They are more earthy and realistic. The blue shade really doesn't work for the gritty real life. But they are becoming very expensive in the common parts (1×2, etc.) so I have to use them sparingly. As it is now, I treat the old shades as rare colours and use them accordingly.

[Jareth]

This subject has really taken a front line in my mind since I'm building a really large MOC and the color issues are a problem, but so are discoloration/fading problems.

Anyway, I understand why people were unhappy with the new grays, but also the old grays were very vulnerable to discoloration. I do like new colors that don't try and imitate an old color like tan and dark green, but I still try and avoid them, simply because it would be hard for me to collect enough to make anything cool. I'd much prefer to stick to red, yellow, green, blue, black and white and add them to what I already have.

[SilentMode]

I actually got rid of the old grey and brown parts from my collection, for consistency. There have been times when I've used brown tiles because I didn't have reddish brown, however.

[Brickdoctor]

I use them together. It used to be annoying, especially when I built Star Wars, but now whenever I build Castle I mix them for stonework and things like that. Old grey looks overall better to me in-person, but as someone who depends heavily on computer editing to make a photo presentable, bley is easier to photograph whenever I have to remove a yellowish tint, because I can give the photo a slight bluish tint without worrying about making all the greys look bley.

[brickmack]

Well I didn't even start collecting until late 2007, so my collection of all of the old colors is small compared to the new ones (Though rapidly growing). Due to lack of sorting space, I keep them sorted together, but I plan to separate them eventually. Since I mostly do space stuff, I like the bley parts more because they look cleaner and sort of like metal, and artificial, good for making clean, new ships. I do sometimes make rocky things like castles and stuff (Haven't posted any yet) so those I use the old greys for (Or sometimes a mixture).

[Ralph_S]

I switched to the blueish greys almost immediately. For many of the things I do -aircraft and cars, for instance- they look better than the old colours. I keep them separate. I also keep reddish brown separate from old brown.

I still do use old dark grey quite a lot because it's just about the perfect colour for US Army Helicopters and I've used it for the roads in my town. I have also tried using old and new grey together to recreate the subtle differences in shade in the camouflage colours of the US Navy, with the following result.

Tophatters F-14A Tomcat (3) by Mad physicist, on Flickr

I wasn't happy with the change at first, but old and new colours all have their use.

Cheers,

Ralph

[Hoboman]

I do not really think of them as 'new' or 'old' colors but rather I tend to think of them as just different colors in my color choices. I have used all of them and will continue to do so.

I am also open to receiving free bricks from anyone who feels the need to dump their "old colors"

[-R8-]

When the color change occurred, I was still growing up playing with my Bionicle sets and making rainbow-colored MOCs, so it didn't matter to me when it happened. In fact, I don't think I even noticed the change in color until I became active in the LEGO community and learned about this. I use the new colors almost exclusively in my creations, because that is what I have cheapest and easiest access to. I have a fair amount of the old colors in my collection too, although they are found in whatever pre-2004 sets that I have intact.

I too treat the new and old colors as separate, and thus keep them segregated in my storage. I try to use them creatively to represent slight color variations that you may find in real life.

[Aanchir]

I have a lot of old and new colors in my collection, but these days I can only really be said to "collect" the new colors. I'm a child of the 90s, when brown and dark grey were possibly for the first time being used in great quantity in sets, so my collection of those colors increased quickly, and as a BIONICLE fan from 2001-2010 I couldn't help but observe the differences in the new colors. At the same time, today I only buy new sets, and any orders I make of older parts tend to be of the newest versions of any color when possible. So my collection of the newer colors far outweighs my collection of the older ones, despite having a good quantity of both.

The reason I prefer to MOC with the new colors is that I have a greater variety of parts in the new colors to begin with (a pretty inevitable fact given that so many useful parts have been introduced since the switch in 2004). I transitioned most quickly into using the new greys, since I was mainly a BIONICLE fan at the time of the transition, and 192 Reddish Brown was not introduced in BIONICLE until 2006-- instead, brown BIONICLE sets used the comparatively ugly color 217 Brown (Dark Flesh). But in general, I prefer the cleaner, purer look of the new greys and brown to the older, muddier-looking colors.

In general, I was not very resistant to the newer colors, even though I've never liked mixing the two in MOCs unless there's absolutely no alternative. This might be in part because a lot of new colors were being introduced even before 2004, and some of them seemed really useless even compared to colors they coexisted with. For instance, 105 Bright Yellowish Orange (Medium Orange) and 106 Bright Orange (Orange) were nearly identical, and I've never really had a use for my Bright Yellowish Orange parts from certain Harry Potter sets in 2001. And yet the colors coexisted! When Bright Yellowish Orange was discontinued in favor of 191 Flame Yellowish Orange (a less-talked-about transition in 2004 or 2005), it was a more than welcome change.

There are certain discontinued colors I miss greatly-- for example, Bright Violet (Purple) and Bright Bluish Green (Dark Turquoise) have not yet gotten suitable replacements, even though some of this year's new colors help at least occupy the absence between red and blue, or between blue and green, in the current palette. I'm hoping that the new Dark Azur will expand to be a full-fledged replacement for Bright Bluish Green, even if it doesn't fit quite as snugly between the greens and blues, being a little closer to blue than I'm totally comfortable with. In general, though, the colors that were actively replaced in 2004-- 2 Grey (Light Gray), 25 Earth Orange (Brown), and 27 Dark Grey (Dark Gray)-- have no special place in my heart. Well, with the possible exception of Earth Orange, which was possibly the first color in the "earth" shade, that being the darkest shade on the basic color spectrum LEGO uses. Today's Earth Green and Earth Blue (Dark Green and Dark Blue on Bricklink) share this with their more classic counterpart. Even today I occasionally use Earth Orange and Earth Blue in LDD concepts as color-coded placeholders for black parts that I need to distinguish from one another for whatever reason.

[Eilif]

Interesting responses all around.

As someone who returned to LEGO as the change was happening, I was caught by surprise, but it never bothered me much nor did it figure into my buying habits. Buying of new LEGO combined with LEGO from my youth and the masses of used LEGO I've purhcased has meant that I have a large stock of each color. As I don't build many huge MOC's I simply use whichever color seems right for a given project.

I do keep them separate though as -except for certain effects created by builders more talented than myself- I don't like the look of them side by side. Lastly, my one strong prefference of all 6 colors is old dark grey. It's such a nice earthy color. I don't seek it out specifically, but it's always a nice surprise when a bag of used brick contains some.

[Dazmundo]

As I wasn't really buying Lego at the time of the change I wasn't really aware of it until recently when I broke down all my old Castle sets to start a MOC of Castle Stalker and when I bought some more bricks to add to it they were a different shade.

Not sure what I'm going to do, probably just mix them and work on the theory that no castle has walls all exactly the same shade of grey!

D

[freakwave]

Regarding the old grey I do not have that much sentiments. It is nice for a weathered design, that's what I use it for.

The color I miss most is the old dark red, it was really a intense color. In 2005 the change came. Now it is nearly reddish brown, not easy to distinguish under artificial light...

[Aanchir]

Regarding the old grey I do not have that much sentiments. It is nice for a weathered design, that's what I use it for.

The color I miss most is the old dark red, it was really a intense color. In 2005 the change came. Now it is nearly reddish brown, not easy to distinguish under artificial light...

It wasn't a huge change like the change in the greys, as it's still got the same color ID (154). Of course, nowadays they've started calling it New Dark Red-- I'm not sure whether that means that the change in 2005 was a conscious change or whether they changed the color again to try and "correct" an unintentional one. Perhaps I ought to ask an ambassador to inquire about this-- I'm not aware of TLG ever completely changing the term they use to refer to a color in the past, so "New Dark Red" is really an anomaly I don't know how to explain.

[Piranha]

I still use old grey on strictly on old grey models only such as 10020 and new grey on new models and never mixing the two. I don't mind them next to each other for example on a car or spaceship because there are different colors/shades of "steel" in real life

[dr_spock]

I was in the dark during the change. It was not an impact to me. I use new grey for my MOCs since it is easier to obtain new.

[Lego Otaku]

I entered my last dark age a bit before LEGO went color-crazy and came out a bit over a year ago. However it wasn't the change in color that threw me off but rather a change in how bricks felt. Newer bricks felt a little softer and didn't snap as loudly as the older bricks. It was probably the time LEGO changed the plastic from batch of pre-dyed from one source to colorless from multiple supplied, while LEGO added their own dyes.

[Aanchir]

I entered my last dark age a bit before LEGO went color-crazy and came out a bit over a year ago. However it wasn't the change in color that threw me off but rather a change in how bricks felt. Newer bricks felt a little softer and didn't snap as loudly as the older bricks. It was probably the time LEGO changed the plastic from batch of pre-dyed from one source to colorless from multiple supplied, while LEGO added their own dyes.

Technically, plastics were still all from one source until the issue with Chinese manufacturing law requiring a certain percentage of domestic materials. Dyes, on the other hand, have been from various sources. You probably have the right idea in that the coloring of dye during production vs. the use of pre-colored granulate may have caused the discrepancy, although TLG also does sometimes change the formulation of their dyes and plastics to better fit safety and quality standards.

[tafkatb]

I was also in the dark at the time of the change, and I doubt I would have even noticed had I not read about the controversy in Jonathan Bender's LEGO: A Love Story. I have yet to put any of my old bricks (all of which still are in a trunk in my childhood home) with any of the sets I've acquired since I came back in 2009, so I haven't yet had a chance to truly compare them. For the most part, I don't mind the slight bluish tint of Medium and Dark Stone Grey, but I modded my Fallingwater set with them and they do seem a little off in that context, especially in photographs. As for Reddish Brown, I like it. It has a nice warm tone and it's perfect for approximating wood. Overall, I exclusively "collect" the new colors, since my collection basically restarted from scratch two years ago and I only buy new bricks and sets for now - though my Bricklink wanted list is rapidly expanding, I still haven't started down the rabbit hole of ordering from there. Yet.

[Brickdoctor]

As for Reddish Brown, I like it. It has a nice warm tone and it's perfect for approximating wood.

I agree with this. I'm right in the middle with the grey/bley issue, preferring one for some uses, the other for other uses, and both for still other uses; but with browns and dk. red I tend to prefer the newer ones. Old Brown is still used for some variation in wood, but I try to stick to reddish brown. I try to stick exclusively to the newer Dark Red.

[Legostein]

Hello!

At my building place, old and new colours are in peacful co-existence.

After the "big colour change", the parts variety especially for light-bluish-gray was much smaller than for the old light gray. With the years parts variety for the new colours increased, but still today, some elements are only available in old colours. For me that's the reason to have both colour lines - old and new.

There are many examples I could give, but let me just point out one recent moc. The 5 x 5 Facet Brick is only one of many pieces that only comes in old light gray colour.

The Prison of Azkaban

Cheers,

~ Christopher

[P4trickvH]

I didn't really noticed the color change because i was not actively involved in LEGO, i just recently returned after like 20 years but i must say i really like the new colors. The old colors i try to avoid now and sell what i still have.

[badboytje88]

I personally like both colors. They add diversity to the LEGO palet. When it comes to buildings I love to mix old and new greys. The difference in shade makes the wall look more realistic and less like a big grey wall. However when it comes to space vehicles I tend to keep my greys separated.