Andrei Medvedev

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Brickit

Lego is loved worldwide and owned in massive amounts. And yet, people keep buying new sets instead of making use of the bricks they already have. Turns out, building without guidance is seriously challenging, a rare pleasure reserved for hardcore geeks and patient kids.

So we built Brickit. An app that brings old bricks back into play. Is scans a pile of bricks, suggests building ideas, guides through assembly step-by-step, and helps find the right pieces in seconds.

My Journey

It was a five-year journey full of invention, tinkering, and learning what it really takes to go the distance. I joined the team as the founding designer just as the R&D of the brick recognition technology was wrapping up and was in need of the right UX and product direction. Over time, my role evolved into Head of Design, where I built and led a small cross-disciplinary design team, while keeping my sleeves firmly rolled up.

Brickit became an overnight success. Within six months of launch, our user base grew tenfold. The app took off among Lego fans worldwide, reaching over 20M downloads and 450K monthly active users by the end of 2024. It was embraced by the community, growing organically for a couple of years without a penny spent on marketing, fuelled by viral TikToks made by users themselves.

Project Highlights

/ Product

Scanner — the core of Brickit’s experience and the key to its virality. The scanning visual was the eye-catching element of the most-viewed TikToks (the all-time record hit 80.8M views) and made the product instantly recognisable.

Builder & Bricks Map — a step-by-step building guide with a locator for required bricks in the scanned messy pile. Instantly finding pieces was the second key feature that helped unlock the building potential of old bricks.

Novelize! — a feature that turns a child’s build into an illustrated short story. Powered by a set of collaborating LLMs, the creation is brought to life as the main character in a one-of-a-kind imaginary tale.

Brickit Express — the most advanced Snapchat lens ever built. An adapted version of Brickit’s core functionality, plus a fun bonus: your build placed in an animated, themed AR scene. Developed in collaboration with Snapchat and Qreal.

Puzzles — a fresh twist on brick play that sharpens building instincts and sparks the imagination. The challenge is to guess the hidden creation by building it from a given set of bricks (spoiler: there’s no such thing as a wrong answer).

Gamification — a playful layer of experience that brings long-term motivation for users to do more with their bricks: build new creations and solve new puzzles.

Onboarding — the first-launch experience that introduces brick scanning process, learns about the user, and eases into the subscription offer. One of the most iterated features, balancing ease of entry and conversion.

Pile[o]meter — a second app for advanced builders, tailored to scan and organise massive brick collections and build large complex creations.

/ Brand

Brand and Identity — a formalised expression of the team’s personality, brought to life through a brand model, visual and sound identities and a custom brand typeface.

Communication Design — explainer videos, websites, exhibition stands, brick set packaging, email newsletters, social media design, all sorts of things.

And more: pitch decks, a dedicated app for educators, a community-driven ideas submission program, social features, a real-time AR mode for the scanner, etc.