Hypebeast Visits: George Gilliatt and the LEGO Campus

The band’s product designer takes us on an exclusive tour of the HQ and discusses the process behind Pharrell Williams’ “Over the Moon” set.

Presented by The LEGO Group

Full-circle moments don’t get any more real than that of George Gilliatt, product designer at the LEGO Group.Having started as an intern, the 27-year-old British designer soon becoming the brainchild behind many of its most iconic sets. Receiving his first-ever LEGO® set at four, he cites the brand as being instrumental in his creative development during his formative years and has since “spent the next 23 years building with bricks.”

The home of the LEGOLAND® theme park, LEGO® House experience as well as the founder’s, Ole Kirk Kristiansen, original house where the idea of launching a toy brand was conceived in 1932 — the small Danish town of Billund is dedicated to preserving LEGO’s legacy.

When Gilliatt arrived at the HQ, aptly named LEGO Campus, the designer took the opportunity to “spend every moment I could in the building, just building stuff.” The realization he had finally made it to the place that’s responsible for his fondest childhood memories inspired him to keep pushing, creating, and making a name for himself. However, a pivotal moment in his (still early) career was working alongside the creators of the sets he grew up playing with. “It felt amazing to meet the person who had essentially designed my childhood,” he says. “Just being in this building with all these creative people who have been so influential to my life is awesome.”

With the brand serving as a career catalyst, he acknowledges first-hand the role LEGO plays in inspiring the next generation of creatives and aims to use his position to re-create the same experiences for others. “I’m super nostalgic about my childhood and the things that formed who I am today, so it’s mind-blowing that I could provide for a kid now what I had back then.”

For the latest edition of Hypebeast Visits, Gilliatt takes us on a tour of the LEGO Campus. From its Zen garden and colorful staircases to the endless amount of LEGO bricks at your disposal, the HQ is a place of infinite inspiration — and the ultimate LEGO haven for any fan let alone a designer like Gilliatt. And unlike other disciplines that require designers to wait for their ideas to come to life, “LEGO bricks are the final material,” he explains. “It’s on the shelf, and we can take it and create right there — it’s like rapid prototyping.”

Working alongside a creative collaborator to build something bespoke (in contrast to movie sets or characters launched in the past) is something that hasn’t previously been done before, making the LEGO Group’s latest partnership with Pharrell Williams a groundbreaking moment for the brand. While in the works for some time, both the Piece by Piece biopic as well as the “Over the Moon” set were both covert operations only a select few were privy to.

With space being a childhood fascination and a core theme to much of Williams’ work, bringing that into the LEGO world was an inevitable route to take for the partnership. This aligned perfectly with Gilliatt’s experience, whose first project at the LEGO Group was a space shuttle where much of the challenges he’d faced were ironed out during the extensive experimenting phase.

Taking his past learnings as well as inspiration from the sneakers worn in Williams’ In My Mind album cover — after a variety of iterations, both entities settled on an out-of-this-world, yet realistic spaceship that incorporated representation, which LEGO and Williams hold in high regard, in the form of customizable mini figures.

Hypebeast: Take us through the LEGO Campus.

George Gilliatt: This campus has been tailor-made to be the most creative building on the planet — it’s what you’d imagine the LEGO® headquarters would look like. Even down to details; the ceiling in the main atrium is the underside of a LEGO plate, the lights are the inverse of the studs, and there are lights where the tubes would go. There are so many different areas around the building to get extra inspiration. The Zen garden, for example, is great to sit in. I’m not sure I entirely believed in Zen at first, but I sat down and suddenly realized an hour had passed and I’d drawn so many circles in the sand, it was super inspiring.

The whole town is formed from the LEGO Group. You can jump between the buildings and see the progress of the brand. Some were made in the 2000s, ‘80s, ‘70s, and even all the way back to the founder’s house, which is still in the middle of the town. His original office is still there, and that’s a meeting room employees can book. I’ve been a few times to sit at his desk and think, ‘What would our founder think of what we’re creating today?’

How did the collaboration with Pharrell Williams materialize?

They put a call out for anyone passionate about music to design a product for something to do with the music industry. It was top secret in the beginning, but I put my name forward without knowing who the person was. They said it was a famous creative so I started thinking about all the different people it could be and Pharrell was one of those, so when it was announced, I couldn’t say I was surprised.

The LEGO Group has never done anything like this before. Typically, we’ll make sets based on a new movie or make our own sets like LEGO® City or LEGO® Friends — this was the first time we ever thought ‘What if we take a real-world creative and work together to form a new vision and build their idea with LEGO bricks.’

How was the experience meeting Williams for the first time?

It was really inspiring. Every time he’s posed with a question, he always takes time before answering, and his response was always something profound.

I went over to his house in Miami, and that was also the first time I’d ever been outside of Europe. I had this kind of “pinch-me” moment where I thought, when I was four years old I got my first LEGO set, when I was 15 years old I was in my bedroom designing my own models, and when I was 25 years old I was at Pharrell’s studio designing a model for him — that was a real moment for me. I still get chills thinking about it.

Can you tell us a bit about the ideation process of the “Over the Moon” set?

We have this process when trying to come up with new ideas called “Crazy Eight” where we fold a piece of paper into eight sections and have eight minutes to think of eight ideas. It puts pressure on you to come up with something, even if it’s the worst idea ever in your head, you jot it down and it might inspire something else.

For Pharrell, our theme was space. We’d already come up with a few ideas – one was to build it vertically, that’s when I thought, ‘What if we put an angle in it?’ It’s so cool that an idea I came up with during one of those sessions inspired what became my favorite aspect of the final product.

How did you settle on the concept of space?

He told us a story of what space meant to him. Growing up in Virginia, he could see all of the spacecrafts taking off and knew that if humankind could make it to the moon, then he and his friends could make it out of the hood – that inspired him to be successful. It was a great quote about what you can achieve if you put your mind to it so, at that moment, we all knew to focus on space — that’s what’s got him going and hopefully, this model can also inspire people to feel the same way.

Representation is key, and the “Over the Moon” abacus embodies that. Tell us a bit about the feature.

We wanted to include some creative aspects to customize it your way. We thought about the jet stream coming with different colors that you could swap out or different minifigure parts — then [Williams] suggested that we have extra mini-figure heads so you can customize the figures in the set. Eventually, we came up with a total of 51 heads — all different skin tones and genders – and two minifigures that you can put yourself and someone else in to fly along with.

And what about the figures of Pharrell and Helen?

Whenever we’re creating a new mini figure based on a movie character or someone from the real world, it’s important for us to ask the person which skin tone they would like to be represented with. We offered Pharrell the range of LEGO colors and he chose one that we hadn’t previously used for a real-world person.

At the time, we had used six skin tones overall, his was the seventh, and since then, two new tones have been introduced. This set also comes with six more heads in the same color to hopefully represent more people around the world.

How was your experience in brick building incorporated into this collab?

The first set I worked solely on as a model designer was a fantasy spaceship and the third was a LEGO® Creator three-in-one set called “Space Shuttle Adventure.” I really immersed myself into researching everything about spacecrafts. When it came to having to build a new space shuttle, I’d already solved a lot of the issues I needed to and could implement them into this design. However, the challenge was how to make something similar in size and function but about 50% lighter so it could stand on its own.

Favorite part of the set?

From a building perspective, it’s the fact we managed to get an angle on the jet stream. The original sketch was just vertical, it was cool but wasn’t very dynamic. LEGO bricks are good at stacking on top of each other, so it was a challenge to figure out how to build an angle but also keep it stable.

Now that it’s leaning forward, you don’t necessarily notice that it’s got that strip down the bottom to keep it balanced. It looks like it’s always about to tip over, which gives the sense that it’s moving and creates a visual that we’ve not really seen in a LEGO product before.

How did it feel unboxing it for the first time?

The journey had been so long, longer than our normal process, so it still felt fresh and was a fun experience to build. Just having the box in my hand was like the final journey of the culmination of all these amazing meetings, collaborations, and the hard work of so many people. I can’t wait to see it on the shelf and see what the fans think.

Why is play important in creativity?

Play is the backbone of creativity. You’re learning something about what works and what doesn’t, and that informs what you do later on. What’s great about LEGO® doing 18+ products is that it inspires adults who typically don’t play as much to start playing and being creative again. We spent ages making this beautiful model, but I hope people take it apart and build their own things out of it because that’s what it’s all about; being creative.

What does the future of LEGO® hold?

We always knew that adults love building LEGO bricks as much as kids do, but now we’ve managed to break down some of the taboo around that and have created a lot more products for adults recently, it seems to be a lot cooler now. We’re on a good path and I just hope we keep doing the things we’re doing, and creating new and different experiences.

What advice would you give your younger self?

From a LEGO® building perspective, it’s just don’t stop building. But broader, don’t stop creating — every opportunity you can to be creative, do it.

Check out the Hypebeast Visits feature with George Gilliatt above. For more information, and to shop the Pharrell William “Over the Moon” set, visit the LEGO Group’s website.