- Chess Board Box -
In-depth review of the building process of a custom Lego Box
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Hello everyone, 
Recently, for a friend's birthday, I designed a whole Lego “set”, in particular the box, and today I wanted to show you how I did it, the different steps, because why not, and I hope it will inspire some of you! 
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For the record, a week ago it was a friend's birthday and instead of giving him something bought, I wanted to create a rather personal gift, and if that wasn't obvious enough, concerning Lego. My friend is a big chess fan, so naturally I decided to make him a fully customized Lego chess board set because I was able. 
For the sake of clarity, I'm going to break down the creative process into several points, but I won't go into detail about all of them so feel free to skip the part you don't wanna read 
- Model Designing -
As for the chessboard itself, I won't go into too much detail as it's just a chessboard with the pawns, nothing fancy, and to be honest, not the most difficult or time-consuming thing in the whole creation process. After a quick order on bricklink, I was able to see the chessboard with my own eyes and in the right colors. 
- Shooting Process -
With the chessboard built, for the front image of the box and for the first image of the instruction booklet, I wanted the chessboard to be quite immersed in real life; a rendering would have seemed too bad. 
Frankly, the shooting wasn’t difficult, I put on a old cupboard in wood I’ve at home, placed a cloth, more like a tablecloth and I gave the impression of integrating the set by placing decorative elements around it. I took the photo with little light, but enough so that it wasn't too dark while still blurring the background. With me holding a lamp toward the ceiling for indirect lighting and a low opening, a quick photoshop retouching and it was done ! 
- Instruction Booklet -
For the instruction, I used the easiest method I know, the software Studio. After a reproduction of the board in studio, which frankly wasn’t that difficult, I used the instruction designing tool to put together a rather clean instruction. To be honest, I’m very far from mastering this tool so I made my best but I had to use Photoshop after to fix ‘Bugs’ that came with the tool.
As I wanted to make a paper booklet, I made sure to have a multiple of 4 steps of instructions for convenience. As for the cover, I used a photo I'd taken, cropped it, added the Lego logo and other elements to make it look like the cover of a Lego set instruction booklet while still remaining interesting. To be completly honest, the process of putting the page together was the hardest part. Trying to arrange the page properly to match front and back was clearly not easy, and that's probably because I didn't have an appropriate method or software to facilitate the process.
I printed it on a white paper, cut in the right dimension, 2 staples and it’s complete, so easy and not time-consuming process 
- Box Designing -
Now we come to the real subject, which I think is the most interesting.
Once I'd acquired the pieces, I separated them into several plastic bags, so as to separate the stages like any other Lego stage. After that, I tried placing the piece in different Lego-sized boxes that I have in my possession, to see how big it would get. A few tries and the Nissan Skyline GT-R (R34) 2 Fast 2 Furious set box appeared to be the right size.
As I didn't really care for the box, I removed the glue (very gently of course ) to lay everything flat. Using a scanner, I scanned the box and as it was too big, I had to assemble the box with the different scans using photoshop to get the whole box.
Below, you can see what it looks like:
A template made, I started modify it to fit what I was envisionning for the box. Here’s a list of the step of the process :
- I've set the color of the box tabs to a light gray tone, dark enough to be seen and not cut by mistake (I'm not saying this because I've cut them by mistake too, which clearly isn't the case).
- I positioned the image I'd taken in front, modifying the size so that the chessboard was sufficient but not too large. I placed the same image at the back, smaller, followed by another image as I had no idea what to put behind the box. I'd advise taking photos of the model from different angles, as this would probably be more clever and better than only putting the same image.
- Where there was already a black square on the template, I added a very subtle dark blue gradient on top, as I wanted to avoid a solid color. The dark blue blends in well with the ''sand blue'' of the fabric in the image, while remaining quite dark, which is why I chose it.
- If you haven’t noticed before, set like Ideas of Icon have a small brick built line on the bottom of the front. I always loved that effect so I tried to reproduce it, and it was quite easy actually using Studio and a render :
- For the Lego logos, as the the one from the template were not in great quality, I changed them with a image I found on internet. (Special thanks to Bryckland for the idea) I placed them wherer they had to be changing the orientation. As for the text, I use the text, I have just used the text tool from Photoshop and for the title, I used the ‘Quartzo’ font in bold.
- Concerning the little model there’s all over the box, I used various render setting the chess board in differents angles. Also, before anyone asks me, I though of making the 1:1 image representing a piece but it seems too complicated and not worth it. 
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After all of that, the actual box design was complete !
So let's have a look at the final result !
After, I included two pictures of the box actually built.
Please note that the picture was taken with my phone very rapidly which explains the low quality and the duct tape is here because it was the first try.
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Hope you liked this in-depth review and that it might help or inspire some
It was acutally very fun and interresting to create. I learned a LOT of thing by doing that.
I'll surely be doing more in the future