LEGO Art Director Morten Bonde Lost His Sight But Sees New Possibilities

When Bonde looks at someone’s face all he can see is one of their eyes—it’s like looking through a cardboard tube. He scans your face, memorizes the fragments, and creates the full image in his mind. The blind spots are filled with flickering lights.

There is no family history that indicated this might happen to him. Bonde posits that he inherited the eye disorder from one of his parents or was born with a mutant gene. According to the National Library of Medicine, 1 in 4,000 people are diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa; there is no known cure.

In 2009, Bonde began work at LEGO headquarters in Billund, Denmark, the birthplace of LEGO bricks. Three months later, he moved to his current position, Senior Art Director.

“Before my job interview, I decided that I wouldn’t tell anyone about my condition, in case it minimized my chances of landing the job,” said Bonde. “I’d managed all these years with a visual impairment without anyone complaining about my work, so why shouldn’t I be able to do the job?”

His work revolves around designing and shaping campaigns and animated films in which the everyday heroes of LEGO City save the day. For someone who played with LEGO bricks ever since he was a boy, this is a dream job. “I look at how we tell a story in the most amazing way,” he says.

From 2009 to 2016, Bonde only told a few people at LEGO, including his boss, about his condition. “I’ve never kept my condition secret, per se, but I certainly didn’t talk about it unless it was absolutely necessary for me,” he says. “My plan at the LEGO Group was to show them that I worked with the same ability and capacity as anyone else with full vision. Once I’d proved that, I would begin to talk to the people I collaborated with about my disorder. And that’s what happened.”

When he walked into a beam in the office, or couldn’t locate his colleagues in the LEGO cafeteria, he passed it off as clumsiness. Since Bonde is unable to see a spot larger than the size of a quarter, he takes a workaround to track where he is on the computer screen. “I use a cursor that is twice the size of the regular cursor,” he says. “I put it in the left hand corner, and I work it slowly back across the screen. That is why it is so demanding to work with large files—the cursor keeps disappearing.”

By scanning every portion of the screen, Bonde can catch most items that might be out of place. The colleague next to him has acted as a sounding board and looked at his work before he submitted it. She might say, This looks awesome. But why is the road in the sky? “It always ends up with a little road in the sky,” sighs Bonde.

Few colleagues suspected anything because there are no visual signs that indicate Bonde is blind. “I was a gymnast as a child; I never fall,” explains Bonde, who is bearded, fit, and has that hearty Nordic spirit that suggests he probably chops wood for fun. “Many people are surprised when I tell them that I am visually impaired and they are absolutely astounded when I add that I work with visual communication,” he said. “And really—can you blame them?”

What Do You Want to Do with Your Life?

One day, Bonde’s wife Mette, with whom he has two boys, flashed Bonde as he stood next to her telling his story. She did so to understand how much sight he had lost.

Two minutes later, when Bonde hadn’t paused his tale, she knew it was bad. To navigate around his home, especially during Scandanavian winter nights, Bonde wore a headlamp. He says he resembled a “miner taking a coffee break.” At times, he forgot to turn it off when he answered the front door. He then met the visitor with a 1,500-lumens-bright hello. 

Every time Bonde had to give up something, like driving, he felt he lost a piece of his true self. So, as with driving, he lived the life he wanted, to the best of his physical ability. When his first ophthalmologist told him that he shouldn’t be on the road, Bonde stopped going to that ophthalmologist.

In July 2016, Bonde went to a new doctor because Mette noticed he was getting clumsier. Bonde wanted to find out if there was a connection between burnout, stress, and depression, and losing one's sight. Upon examining Bonde’s eyes, the doctor discovered that Bonde had lost so much vision he was now in the legally-blind category. Bonde asked if it was a good idea to stop driving, to which the doctor exclaimed, "ARE YOU DRIVING?!”

Later that year, in December, Bonde visited his local municipal office. The social service workers told him to consider a “flex job,” a part-time role to earn half his living himself and then the government would provide the rest. That, he believed, was his destiny. 

But as he sat in the sterile room, Bonde felt their voices fade away. The voice inside his head suddenly spoke up: What do you want to do with your life? 

“I stood up, and said, ‘Sorry guys, but I have to go and figure out what I have to do’, because everyone was making choices for me,” recalls Bonde. “In that office, my identity died. Weeks after that experience, I realized I could reinvent myself. The answers were inside me. I had to listen to my body, not what my confused and hectic mind told me.” 

I Have My Imagination

To begin his path towards reinvention, Bonde told his colleagues at LEGO the whole story. “After my body snapped, I knew I had to tell people,” he says. Still, Bonde worried LEGO might fire a legally-blind Senior Art Director. “That was a fear,” he says. “Today, I can see it was the opposite.”

Bonde has adapted how he tells the stories of LEGO heroes. “A few years ago, I started writing to transform myself from a visual art director to a writer,” he says. “My conceptual way of thinking helps my writing.” When he talks to his leaders now, they say he doesn’t need his eyes to do his work. “I have my mind, my creativity, my ideas,” he says. “I can do my job because I can imagine.”

To widen his perspective, Bonde listened to books about religion, philosophy, physics, even mysticism, to learn everything he could about the world. One author wrote about the human mind’s ability to imagine. That resonated. “I started to imagine the life that I want,” he says. “That ability came from all the years of working as a creative because we have to imagine something that maybe doesn’t exist yet, except in our minds.”

The mindset change helped Bonde transform from the inside out. “I started to not listen to my inner voice telling me what I couldn’t do,” he says. “And I discovered that if I found that moment of quiet peace in myself, the smaller my problems would be because they were often only real in my imagination.”

Take dropping a cup. When it happens, Bonde tells himself he has all the time in the world to find it. “I take that deep breath,” he says. “I won’t allow myself to get stressed about things I can’t change.” 

He knows he should acquire a cane, but he has so far resisted it. “I have a blockage that wants to hold onto the Morten I’ve always known,” he says. “That will change the day I wear something that identifies me as a visually-impaired person. But, hey, I’m much more than my ability to see; I’m what I decide to be.”

Losing Vision, Gaining Courage

This month, Bonde tells his life story in Sentenced to Blindness. Now What? “Maybe I am losing my vision, but I have gained the courage to do anything I decide,” he says. His life experience has connected him with a powerful project from the LEGO Foundation—new braille bricks for visually-impaired children. Some of the studs have been removed on the bricks, so they can feature the letters of the braille alphabet. These LEGO bricks will be given to schools, institutions, and services catering to the education of the blind in the United States, UK, Denmark, Norway, Germany, France, and Brazil. Bonde has served as a representative for those who face visual challenges. “The first time I saw them, the hairs on my arms stood up,” he says. 

The braille bricks are designed with a unique element—they have both braille letters and text letters. “We put letters on the bricks so it will be an inclusive toy for both visually-impaired and sighted children,” says Bonde. “They can play together and collaborate to build something.”

For Bonde, this also prompted a reality check. “It was like a sign from the universe saying, ‘Braille bricks: Have you thought about that?’” he says. “Dealing for a future without vision is freakin’ scary.” What’s his long-term plan? “I deal with what I have this week, this week,” he says. “I will deal with next week, next week.”

A Masterpiece

Today—at least during non-Covid times—Bonde takes public transportation to commute the 90 minutes each way from his home in the countryside to LEGO headquarters. In a car, it takes 30 minutes door-to-door. Whereas others might view the length as a real drag, Bonde sees the upside. “Commuting has become a gift because I have all these books I listen to on the bus,” he says. 

Bonde is the first to tell you that he does not feel sorry for himself. “I come with humor,” he says. “When I do things that are awkward because I can’t see, I laugh. It’s not a tragedy.” (This includes accidentally sitting on someone in a Turkish bath, which has happened a few times.)

To illustrate his point, he tells the story about tipping over a cup the other day. The liquid stained the floor. “But the stain that I made kind of looked like Donald Duck,” says Bonde. “A masterpiece!”

Matt McCue is the co-founder of Creative Factor. He lives in New York City, but is willing to travel long distances for a good meal.