How Emily in Paris Came to Be, and More on Creativity

Welcome to our newsletter. Every Wednesday, we dive into our top interviews and pull some prime insights that have generated pioneer creative work, including ways of working, the most practical creative skills, and career moves that can change the game.?

This week, production designer Anne Seibel how she created the world of Emily in Paris, using just the right shapes, proportions, colors, and delegation... Then, Anna Corral and Rodrigo Corral, founding partners of Wutch, share with us how they designed the "Goodreads" of streaming, all from scratch. Finally, David Schwarz, founding partner of HUSH, shares his team's perspective on designing sustainability by whittling everything down to what's most important, both for his business and for the greater ecosystem.

1. Creative Lessons from “Emily in Paris,” According to Production Designer Extraordinaire Anne Seibel

French production designer Anne Seibel starts every sketch by hand, letting her mind search for the right shapes, proportions, moldings, and colors to match her vision of a story. It takes hours, and by the time she’s finished, she’s built a world. If you want to see her work, look at the production sets for films and shows like Emily in Paris, Midnight in Paris, and Paris Can Wait (basically anything set in Paris). Her fingerprints are all over them.?

“I like to tell people that I’m like the conductor of an orchestra,” says Seibel. “There are so many sets for Emily — probably 180 sets in total. I don’t have the time for that. So I collaborate with the team to show them my vision and mood. And I’ve worked with the same illustrator for 20 years because she draws like me; the way she draws is like the opposite of a computer drawing, you know?”

Read the full story here, where Seibel shares the creative lessons from working as a production designer for some of the biggest titles out there, including how she applies what she learned from architecture to set design; how she navigated the challenges of working as a woman designer in a male-dominated field; and the biggest and boldest idea she didn’t know she’d be able to pull off for Emily in Paris.

2. Anna and Rodrigo Corral: Designing the Goodreads of Streaming

Of the bazillion things streaming, what is really worth watching? To make it easy, Anna Corral and Rodrigo Corral launched Wutch , the Goodreads of shows and films.

“We’re trying to squash the infinite scroll. We saw data that said people spend more than 100 hours a year scrolling through social media platforms. The entire objective of this app is to give you the best feed of what to watch, aggregated in one place,” Anna says. “You want to see what is recommended, which friends recommended it, and their one-sentence review.”

Read the full interview here, where Anna and Rodrigo spoke from their downtown studio about the thinking that led to the creation of Wutch; how this social experiment stands apart from other crowd-sourcing apps; and why human recommendations trump algorithms.

3. Specialization and Sustainability: Good for the Bottom Line and the Earth

For HUSH founding partner David Schwarz , adding anything new to the world means having to consider its impact. That’s why him and his team specialize in designing new things sustainably? —?the future of the planet is too grave for anything but precision and intention.?

“As I get older, it’s less about adding things to the ecosystem and more about what we don’t do and taking things away,” he says. “We’ve scraped away all the things that we really aren’t experts at and what's left is undeniably our area of expertise. The more we whittle away and focus on the things that only we can do, the better our work becomes and the scale and impact of it increases.”

Read the full story here, where Schwarz shares why his team welcomes and celebrates people who want to push their craft in new, unexpected directions.

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Newsletter written by Contributing Editor Madeleine Magill.