LEGO billboards: how to fill your city with adverts
Last bus gone, coffee still on offer. Somebody waited on that bench a long time.
Walk down any real street and count the adverts. A billboard over the junction, a poster in the bus shelter, a hoarding round the building site promising new homes. LEGO billboards do the same job in a city MOC: they tell you people live here, shop here and are being sold things. Most layouts have none, which is why the streets feel like a showroom.
Three sizes, three places
The big roadside billboard sits high, where the traffic sees it: on a gable end, above a row of shops, on legs at the edge of a car park. We print those for a 2x4 tile, twice as wide as it is tall, which is the shape of the real thing. The bus shelter poster is upright and at eye level, so it goes on a 2x3 tile on the back panel of a shelter. Hoardings are long and low, the boards round a building site, so they take a 2x6 strip.
Start with the bus stop
A LEGO bus stop is the easiest place to begin. Most shelters have a back panel that takes a 2x3 tile, and once there is a poster on it the stop stops being a box by the kerb and becomes somewhere people wait. Face the advert towards the pavement, where the queue stands, not towards the road.
Every advert needs three things
We learned this one the hard way. Our first billboards said WOOF and SPLASH and nothing else, and Jo asked the obvious question: is WOOF dog food or a dog walker? A real advert gives you a picture, a brand name and one short line saying what is being sold. Woof, dog food. Splash, water park. That third line is what turns a coloured rectangle into a business.
Made-up brands tell a better story
A real logo on a LEGO street is a nod to the outside world. A made-up one belongs to your city. Skyline Air flies from the airfield two streets away. The Daily Grind advertises the coffee shop on your corner, and Golden Crust the bakery next door. Look closely at the bus shelter and Brenda from the Daily Grind is playing tonight with her band, Brenda & the Beans.
Let the adverts age
Not everything has to be new. A film that is coming soon, a board nobody has rented, a missing cat notice in the shelter: these small stories are what people lean in to find. Put a hoarding next to some graffiti and the building site has clearly been there a while.
Our Billboards sheet has forty adverts across all three sizes, made to sit alongside the rest of the City range. If your street needs an advert for a business of your own, a shop name, a band, a family joke, that is what custom LEGO stickers are for.
