LEGO confirms new colour is coming to Super Heroes and Speed Champions

The LEGO Star Wars team has revealed how the new shade of trans-black came to be – and that it’s already coming to at least two other themes.

75346 Pirate Snub Fighter is one of at least six new LEGO Star Wars sets launching for this year’s May the 4th celebrations, marking our first product based on The Mandalorian Season 3, and the debut of a brand new colour in the LEGO palette. The small ship’s windscreen is a new shade of transparent black, with a cool blue tint, which sits at odds with the classic brown-tinted trans-black colour.

In a roundtable session with Brick Fanatics and other LEGO fan media, the LEGO Star Wars team explained how the new hue joined the official LEGO line-up – and confirmed that it’s already being put to use across other themes.

“We have a colour palette that we work from, and it’s not a palette of colours that is allowed to grow without any restrictions, because we have to be able to put our product on the shelf,” says LEGO Star Wars Design Manager Michael Lee Stockwell. “We have to reduce how complex it is to get all these tiny elements into all these different products, and the more possibilities you have colour-wise, the more difficult that becomes, so we have a limitation of X number of colours that we can do.

“Now there was a choice in the design group to see whether or not we could explore a new transparent black element colour. And that’s what the official name of this colour is, transparent black. It has a number as well, 375. And we will see, but it looks as though it may, at some point, replace the 111 that we know today. It’s a great colour also for Speed Champions, and many of the cars they’re doing. And I think also Super Heroes has used it.”

While the new shade of transparent black will make its first appearance in the windscreen for 75346 Pirate Snub Fighter, it wasn’t specifically developed and introduced by the Star Wars team. As it turns out, adding new colours to the portfolio is a company-wide effort. 

“These decisions come from a consensus throughout all the projects here,” explains graphic designer Maddy O’Neil. “We can float ideas or preferences, things that we feel like we need, and then that’s taken into consideration by a group that determines what the choices will be.”

“It wasn’t a Star Wars decision,” Stockwell adds. “And just to make it all clear, there is not really any one product line that can on its own [introduce a new colour]. If you put a new colour into the palette, you have to take one out. That’s kind of the way it works. So if there’s a real need for a certain colour, then we have to look at, well, what can we live without?”

That one-in, one-out policy suggests the previous shade of trans-black will indeed be making way for this newer hue in the next few months. And it’s not difficult to imagine plenty of uses for the new shade across Super Heroes and Speed Champions – from car windscreens to a canopy for a future Batmobile.

Batman is already rumoured to be making a return in this summer’s Super Heroes line-up, but we haven’t yet heard anything about future Speed Champions 2023 sets. While this tease doesn’t confirm anything else is coming from the racing theme this year – Stockwell may be referring to 2024 products – last year saw two more sets join the line-up in August, so it’s not out of the question…

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75346 Pirate Snub Fighter launches May 1 for £29.99 / $34.99 / €34.99. Check out all of this year’s LEGO Star Wars May the 4th releases – as well as every single offer, deal and free gift – by clicking here.

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