Behind the Oscar-nominated design: How ‘Sinners’ makes you believe its world

24:46And there's lots of gushing blood, make no mistake. But there really are all of these moments where it's a movie about atmosphere and Mississippi sharecropping. And I don't know if you just used the word painterly, but the landscapes and the spaces are really striking. And, you know, even the topic of the movie is that it is beautiful before it is absolutely terrible. Right? Exactly. That is really the plot sort of, you know, summarized. And I think that plays out so much in the visuals. And we actually had a conversation with the person who is responsible for this atmosphere. For this episode, we spoke to production designer Hannah Buechler.

25:25She's an Oscar winner with an illustrious list of credits, including the Black Panther series, Moonlight, Creed, Fruitvale Station, numerous Beyonce projects, and then obviously most recently, Sinners. We spoke to Hannah about her career as a Hollywood production designer, how she created Sinner's unique, specific world, and her own background growing up with an architect father and how that influenced her career. Here's that conversation. Hannah, we are so glad to have you here ahead of the Academy Awards. Welcome to By Design.

25:57Hannah Beachler:Thank you. It's good to be here. So, Hannah, we first spoke, I think, in 2018 around the release of Black Panther. We went really deep on how you built Wakanda with this wild 515-page Bible, the Wakanda Bible. And you shared so much. I was so surprised by just your history, like how much you had done before you became a production designer. You were a fashion designer. I believe you made toys for Hasbro for a while. Yeah, I worked at Hasbro. I didn't make the toys. I worked with, yeah, I worked more on the corporate side. Worked on the corporate side of Hasbro, okay. You eventually landed a gig on a Hallmark movie where you fell in love with production design.

26:40And you were, you were like cleaning, I think you said a kitchen floor for a day. Yes. And then, like, so in the 2010s, then you start making like a lot of horror movies, right? And you pretty much were until you team up with Ryan Coogler on Fruitvale Station. And so I remember you telling me, this is a big setup, But I remember you telling me that when Thomas, the production designer behind, you know, a lot of Spike Lee projects, you know, recently Hidden Figures, he gave you a key piece of advice, which was stop working on horror films.

27:13Hannah Beachler:He did say that. It's funny to me because you made Sinners, which is obviously a horror film, and it's the most nominated movie in Oscar film history. So I guess I want to know. Full circle. Full circle, exactly. So, you know, I guess I'm really curious, you know, what drew you back? Right. Like what drew you back into the genre? And was it was it like, you know, hopping back on the bike, like to sort of embrace that genre again? Well, one of the things was, I mean, the major thing was Ryan. Right. You know, he's, you know, said, I'm doing this this movie. It's like it's a horror movie. And I was like, I was like, oh, Ryan doing horror.

27:49Hannah Beachler:What would that look like? But then, you know, I went into like, I told him, I said, you know, I did all these horror movies in, you know, in Louisiana and Shreveport, New Orleans. And I was like, I know all about blood. I know all about what to do with blood. I'm ready. So, yeah, I was excited to get back into it. And I was really curious about, because he's never done horror. And I was interested to see what does that look like coming from Ryan. and like what, because I knew it'd be more, right? I knew there was going to be something to it. Yeah, you know, it's interesting that you said that you knew there was going to be something more because one thing that I was really curious about, you know, this movie is unique in that it is supernatural horror, but it's also deeply rooted in reality, you know, down to the smallest details.

28:39And so how did you begin thinking about what the atmosphere of sinners could look and feel like given those two very different vibes or requirements?

28:50Hannah Beachler:You know, that's a great question because the first thing I did was I kind of, because I didn't really know where to like go, I went to what I do know, which was start researching the time period, start researching the area, the Delta, the economy, the people, what was happening in the world at that time and how did that affect life in the Delta? What was the economy in Mississippi? And what were the different cities? You know, I started poking around and found Mount Bayou, which I talked to Ryan about. And he ended up having that little scene in Sinners where they talk about Mount Bayou as the first free Black settlement city.

29:34Hannah Beachler:And I went and visited Mount Bayou and Clarksdale and everything. So I wanted to go there. I wanted to talk to the people. I brought back a bag of dirt. I was like, let me put some dirt because it's a specific color in Clarksdale, like nowhere else in Mississippi. You think that deep red, orange dirt like Georgia, but it's not. It's that strawberry blonde. So I got into the dirt too. And I wanted to go to the Blues Museum and the Blues Trail. And I wanted to go to Juke joint. And I wanted to see some of the historical juke joints. So I started to understand the land. And my father always said, you can't build anything if you don't know what the land looks like.

30:18Hannah Beachler:That was his big thing. So I also always go back to that. So once I kind of understood that, started getting more of the story from Ryan, some of my research with the Library of Congress, I came upon these beautiful color photos of the time that, you know, the government would go out and they would do sort of these propaganda type things to get people to come to the region to pick cotton, right? So it was, they were bringing people from Mexico. They were bringing people from all over even the north coming down because cotton was king. They were doing$115 million of exports in the 30s. So that's a huge amount of money.

30:53Hannah Beachler:So they needed people to come. So I tend to do too much. So I found these beautiful pictures in color that the government had taken for the FSA, the Farm Services Administration. And it's like we never see this time period like this. You never see the skin tones. Like it's always black and white. It's always that silver color, right? You never see the yellow flowers on the dress or the color of the dirt or the dirt on their feet, right? That little dusty color on the feet. You never really see the color of the cabins, the chipped red paint or the clothesline hanging up. And in those images, I found that mystical fantasy, you know, and I wanted to bring that in.

31:42Hannah Beachler:And why I added the paint blue, the rust red of the juke joint and the white white of the church. And then when you go downtown, it's like there's a red building. There's all this color. So Hannah, I mean, I'm really glad you brought up the church and the structures, because one of the things that struck me from the very beginning of the movie is that the structures are framed like paintings almost, right? Like we saw it in multiple shots. The church framed largely the same way each time. I'm not smart enough to glean the meaning on my own, like why you sort of set it back and like had the land around it so big.

32:21But it did feel really intentional and really meaningful. And I would love for you to just talk to me about the church because the church was so striking as a visual.

32:29Hannah Beachler:That and everything you said, a lot of that kind of proscenium look for me comes from Tarkovsky. A lot of his films are very proscenium, but they have so much depth. And when you first come to the door of the church and it opens, you move through it. In that same way, we frame up the three crosses at the back of the church. And so you have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit with Jedediah and Sammy underneath that middle cross. Did not notice that, but that's very interesting. Yeah, there's a lot. And a lot of that structure for me was, you know, when talking to Ryan, he's like, well, what would Jedediah had done?

33:11Hannah Beachler:how would his church look? And because he's a hardliner, you know, he's a fire and brimstone type of a preacher, that I think every detail that he could make mean something he would. So that middle cross above his podium is in between the beams. That's 33 inches, cross on center, which is the age that Jesus died. And I think that he would have like done that, like stand beneath that, right? All of the wood is dimensionally cut. So going back to when they were building slave cabins and sharecropper cabins, we say one by one, but it's really one and three quarters, right? One by three quarters, three, well, you know what I'm saying.

33:59Hannah Beachler:So, but then it was all literally dimensionally. So it'd been a true one by one or true 10 by 10. We don't cut wood like that anymore. And there's a sense of heaviness to it. And it's also very beautiful. A two-by-four is truly a two-by-four. And we also used rough sawn wood. So it comes right off the tree. It's not milled, and it's wet. So when it seeps, you get this really beautiful natural aging. So we used all the rough sawn and painted it white, let it seep, painted it white, let let it seep, painted it white till you get that really beautiful texture. And it was really important that it's small, but had this sense of, you know, grandeur as you come through.

34:44Hannah Beachler:And that's when the beams came in. And, you know, I worked with Autumn Duralt because I knew some of that would be in IMAX. So she had her people in LA, sort of, I gave her all the measurements of like the size of the church. And we needed to know where the beams fell, like how low did they have to be to be in the frame at the door and then fall out of the frame halfway through. So we framed them up on the wall. So a lot of that became very technical. But I wanted the beams, I wanted it to be beautiful. And when I was at Dockery Farms in Clarksdale, where Blues was born, they had this such beautiful beam work.

35:23Hannah Beachler:It was very intricate. And I wanted to bring that in. And I wanted the light to be able to come through those beams. Because I feel like for Jedediah, that feels very heavenly. And the windows open so we can see the land because it's because of the land that we have the church. That was a very important thing back in those days. You know, Christianity was something that was coming into the Black community in that way, right, as you kind of go through time. So I wanted that to be seen. I wanted people to understand, like, beyond this, church is a cotton field. So that sort of juxtaposition of sort of the mortal coil, if you will, of, like, the good and the bad, in a way.

36:09Yeah, I think it's so interesting, bringing this also back to your use of color across the film. Everything, I guess, Christian holy is packaged as white. And then you have sort of red at the juke joint and red for plantation dollars and sort of, right, like the red of blood and all of that. You have blue when you're, I think, in hoodoo spaces and looking at sort of, I guess, like African-based spirituality. And then the cotton field is this kind of interesting, almost mortar to me, because when I saw that, I saw like purple. Like I saw these kind of whites, browns and purples. And it almost feels like a mortar between all of these spaces across the film.

36:53But definitely, I guess, a character unto itself.

36:56Hannah Beachler:It is. And I think that's a really great way to describe it, because if you were to look down at a map, the cotton is what holds everything together. It's in between everything. The cotton was the most important thing. That's why I was like, throw it in the road. When you look at these old pictures, cotton's everywhere. It's mounded up. When Sammy throws his bag on the porch, it's just a mound of cotton. You see cotton on the roads when we get to cornbreads, because when they're going off in their carriages, it's fallen off the back. and it's what held together the economy. It's what held together families.

37:30Hannah Beachler:It's what held together this idea of growth at that time. And then we, of course, get to the Depression and everything goes south, but no pun intended because we're in the South. But yeah, so I think that that was really important. And the blue of Annie's is that haint blue, you know, and living in New Orleans, I'm very familiar with it. And the thing about it is that there's different colors that haint blue. In New Orleans and Savannah, you're going to get that real light blue underneath the porches, right? Some say to keep away mosquitoes. Some say to keep away evil spirits. But when you get to the East Coast, South Carolina, Florida coast, you are hitting the Gullah Geechee Coast, which is really the people who know their whole ancestry coming from Angola, coming to South Carolina.

38:20Hannah Beachler:They were specifically taken to grow rice in South Carolina. But then, I think it was one plantation, one huge plantation. When that plantation master passed away, he left the land to his slaves. So then they owned that. And they kept their culture. They kept all of the spirituality, all of the things that came with them from Angola. So that haint blue is a very different color. It's a very teal green. And almost sometimes you'll see Hank Blue and it'll be green when you're looking sort of in that region. And it was so beautiful and punchy and sort of singular, which I think that Annie was within the film.

39:05Hannah Beachler:You know, she was kind of the knowledge of the spiritual world. She tells us the story in the beginning. So I wanted that to be so prevalent that when she walks to that back door, she's framed in this protection. And she's going to bring that protection to the group. So, and then when the little girls come out and they do that wide shot, you see that it's not just around the window frames, it's the front of the house. So that was that color. And in the end, when I first did the sketches and I did the juke, Annie's, and the church, and I instantly knew the church was going to be white. And then Annie's, okay, hate blue, and it's going to be this blue-blue.

39:47Hannah Beachler:And then I was like, well, I think that because of capitalism, because of blood, lust, greed, all of these things, we have the red of the juke joint. Hedonism, right? The devil is there. And I think Jedediah talks about it. We have an American story, red, white, and blue, and it is a Southern Gothic American story. And that also kind of speaks to that color scheme. Yeah. And also even Smoke and Stack, right? Like having their colors, they sort of have their own colors, which was helpful for me just as like an orienting mechanism, like who's who, like what's going on? I don't know if that was, I mean, everything seems to be intentional in this movie and the work that you do.

40:29So what was the thinking there?

40:32Hannah Beachler:Yeah, it was very much, you know, and once I kind of pitched the red, white and blue to Ryan and we talked about it and I was he was like, OK, yeah, I can see that. When we and then when him and Ruth Carter, the costume designer, were talking about, like, how do we separate, you know, Smoke and Stack? Again, the blue came with Annie in this more stoic, more taking action. And, you know, Smoke was the one who killed the father, who shoots the guy, you know, Stack in this red with the Italian fedora, of course, the Irish and the Italian, very flashy. He's about the money. He's about the thing, the gold tooth, right?

41:14Hannah Beachler:He's going to manipulate and gaslight before he pulls out a gun. So he's not so serious about the threat, right? And not like Smoke. And it can be very stinging and biting. And I think he needed to be shown in this very calm color because blue, like water, can be very calming, very spiritual. Whatever's coming from that in his place, whether it's anger or this sense of obligation, it's going to be direct and it's not going to be pain-free. whereas with Smoke or Stack, it's like, you know, he's drinking a beer, he's manipulating Delta like, ah, you want that cold beer? All right, we'll come to make$20, right?

41:58Hannah Beachler:So, you know, he's always playing, you know, both sides of the fence. And I think that's a little bit where that red came from. Yeah, I mean, I noticed the red right away, but the red that Grace uses for the sign almost glowed, right? I don't want to linger too much on colors, although I think colors are so significant in this movie. But I just sort of noticed like when she and there was that whole interaction with her being like, we've only got red. And then he tries to negotiate it down. And it's so good. It's so good. I don't know. She's also painting that sign red. And you're like, oh, this is bad.

42:32Things are about to go real bad.

42:34Hannah Beachler:Yes. Right. Yeah. You know, it's a little foreshadowing. It's a little showing us kind of who everybody is in a very subtle way. And I think it's also like just something to bring from them to the juke because there's a piece of everybody's environment in that juke, whether you see it or not. So I'm always interested to see what people say about like, okay, what do you think was the church? And, you know, what do you think was Annie's that's in there? So those, because everything also has a twin. The church and Annie's are twins. Their spirituality, they're just different ends of the, different sides of the coin.

43:13Hannah Beachler:The church and the juke are twins because both encapsulate greed to some degree. And I believe there's one of the scenes that they shot that isn't in the film was actually passing the collection plate. And, you know, there was a kind of a insert shot of that going around, sort of to signify and people putting their plantation money in it. So it's sort of to signify like, then we have the guy buying his corn liquor with the plantation money. So are they different? That's kind of that question there. My God, there's just so many details that obviously I did not notice. I need the film replaying right now.

43:53Yeah, exactly. Like I need it on like the separate screen next to us. I mean, what's so interesting to me is that you're almost over designing, right? Like usually, you know, traditional Hollywood films, they're essentially a business. And so, you know, sets are built to express themselves really only to the lens and to the screen. And what you're doing is adding on a lot more. I'm curious, like, how do you do that? Like, do you have to get, you know, buy-in from the studios, from the directors? Is it just asking your team to put in extra time?

44:27Hannah Beachler:Yeah, and everything you say is so true because I think part of it is getting sort of this buy-in from everybody. And, you know, when I go and I sit down and I'm sort of like pitching the world and stuff to the studio and the producers, you know, Ryan already knows, so I don't have to pitch to him. But, you know, to people who haven't been on a film with us, that if I believe it and I'm excited by it and I know what it's going to take and it is putting in more hours, it is asking much, much more of the crew and really asking them to trust me that this is going to be good, guys. so there's a lot of work to get it to for us to be able to do that because it also takes time and oftentimes time we don't have such a great crew I mean they really stuck in there with me it was important that we do the we go through the process of figuring out the right way to age things figuring out the right wood to use having millions of samples like Annie's house every single one of the shingles is a real wood cedar shingle that had been soaked in water so it would bend.

45:45Hannah Beachler:And there was over 500 of them. And they did them individually and they're individually painted. I asked that of my crew. Now, do you see that roof for a second, but boy, doesn't it look great? And when you roll up to that set, everybody was like, actually, people were like, I didn't know this was here. I didn't know they had this old sharecropper cabinet back here on, you know, Creedmoor Plantation. I'm like, they didn't. This is brand new. We built it. But that's, again, stepping into the world because if their psychology isn't on point, it's not going to come across on the film. And so oftentimes it's more important for me for it to be right for Ryan than if we're going to see it.

46:36Hannah, there's such a dreamlike quality to the first half of the film. And I'm really curious about the effect you were trying to create there. And I'm thinking particularly about the scenes, the driving scenes, where you see the vehicle, you know, against the fields. And there's almost, to me, like a staged element to it. Like you see in like classic Hollywood films where there'd be a projection, you know, projection of like, you know, everything moving in the back versus like fully blending that. And so, yeah, I'm curious about some of those choices.

47:11Hannah Beachler:Well, a lot of that, I think, would come down to like an Ottoman Orion choice. For us, we just built in as much real plants as possible. Of course, we were in sugar cane field and they weren't grown up yet, but we planted our cotton. And I think it comes down to the anamorphic lens that she shoots so wide that you do get like your edges are really soft. Right. And it feels dreamy as you move. And for me, and in just the conversation with Autumn and Ryan, a lot of that is like that the fuzziness of the edges of the world. So it kind of puts you in this place where you're not necessarily in this earth's dimension.

47:57I'm curious, have you always felt like a visual storyteller? Is this something like from a young age you were thinking about or doing in your own, you know, young way?

48:10Hannah Beachler:Yeah, you know what? And I attribute this to my father, who was an architect. He's passed a long time now. And there were six children. And I think maybe I was the one that was interested in what he was doing because nobody else was. so um he would kind of take me everywhere and one of the things from a very young age I'm like six seven years old right and I'd go to job sites and I just always love putting on the little hard hat and I can remember all of the framing right and I didn't understand like it was just like a lot of boards and framed out electrical ends. And he would walk me through and say, now you're in the hallway.

48:59Hannah Beachler:Do you see it? And then picture the walls will be like this. Can you picture it? Now, can you see that when you get down here, you're going to open up into the kitchen? Can you see it? For my whole life. So eventually, he didn't have to guide me. We'd walk into a job site and I'd know. I'd see it. I'd see what he was doing. I would look at his. I'd go and sit on his lap while he was doing blueprints. Because back in those days, he was hand drawing blueprints, right? And on his big desk. And so I was so much around that and around the interior designers. And I remember there's thousands of sample books.

49:42Hannah Beachler:You know, they just had this whole hallway of sample books. And I would just pull them all out and look at all the little carpet samples. I love, like, touching them in, like, all the colors, every color you could imagine. So it was a really—and then he designed the house I grew up in. And I helped him build the guest house when I was 13. And, I mean, he put a chainsaw in my hand right away. I was going to say, with your own two hands, you helped build it. Yes. Wow. Yeah, and he built that house with his own two hands, a whole house. And his father was a builder, a contractor and a builder. So it kind of ran in the family.

50:23Hannah Beachler:And I honestly was like, I'm going to be a fashion designer. And I think he was just happy that I was going into something creative because all my brothers and sisters were in sports or medicine and, you know, not really doing what my father was doing. So I kind of became the person. And we would just drive around every Sunday and we would go and look at these houses and he'd be like, that's an Italianette. You know, it was built between this time and this time. This is a Huber house. It's based on, you know, Mr. Huber who in the 50s, they had make affordable housing, but they wanted individual houses to start creating suburbs.

51:01Hannah Beachler:And there are these little tiny brick homes in Huber Heights, which is named after Mr. Huber. So, you know, we would drive around and he would talk to me about different styles, about Greek revival. He would talk to me about traditional colonialism. And I didn't know I was getting the education until I actually got into this work. So that was, and it was everything to my dad. You know, he painted huge water, beautiful watercolors. And then we lived out in the middle of the woods. And so I spent a huge amount of my time out in those woods trying to build things. Like I always wanted to build like a hut or a house, right?

51:44And then you would clear it out and you would bring in flowers and grass and you find pine needles and make a bed.

51:52Hannah Beachler:And I'd steal sheets from the house. And, you know, the creek would have like a little bit of a sandy beach to it, you know, just a little sliver of it. And that would be like where we would get our water and we'd make a path out of the rocks and we'd carry rocks all day to make a path to our house. And, you know, we would find an old cabin in the woods. I'm like seeing I'm seeing this as a movie right now that I really want to watch like in my head. You know, and that and it was so important to me. Like we find an old cabin. I remember this old cabin we found in the woods. And boy, howdy. We were like, we're living now.

52:28Hannah Beachler:This is a big, giant, like, playhouse. and we would steal stuff from the houses. My neighbor and I would steal stuff and we'd bring it in there and we'd just set up a playhouse. So we were just free to do those things and our imagination could go wherever we wanted it to go. And my parents quite encouraged that because the fashion side of me was I dressed however I wanted to. I was never in anybody's box. My mom used to call me a trendsetter. I remember my dad got these brand new, boxers. And I remember I wore leggings and I put the boxers over the leggings and I wore this big sweater with a brooch.

53:09Hannah Beachler:Remember the eighties? We remember the eighties. I don't, and I went to school and the principal called my mom and told him to come get me because I was wearing men's underwear. Boxers weren't wearing the boxers became a thing like in the early nineties. So I guess you were. It did. And, and with the leggings underneath it. So I remember doing that and just like always dyeing my hair. I was the one that always had different color like hair. I put sun in and bleach it and then I put a color on it. So I was always kind of in that space, quite just like in my own head, in my own world and no one ever stopped me.

53:46Hannah Beachler:So I just continued to do that. Zooming out from Sinners for a second, there are a lot of, I think, really nice films out this year. And I'm curious, for you as a professional, as a professional production designer, looking around at fellow nominees or not, were there one or two sort of moments or pieces of work that really stuck with you this year outside of your own? There was. One of the films that really stuck with me was Begonia. Oh, did it get nominated? Yeah, it's up for Best Picture and I can't remember if it's up for Best Picture Design. Yeah. It's best production. I did not see him. Sorry, Fiona.

54:27Hannah Beachler:I love her to death. We were actually nominated together. She did the favorite the last time. What was the other one? Frankenstein. Beautiful. I love Guillermo del Toro. And I don't know Tamara, but I can't wait to meet her. His films are always so lush. The world. And they're epic, right? Like, they're epic in size of sets and how much depth and how big. And a lot of it is all built and all created and such a beautiful work, just amazing work. And then, of course, Marty Supreme, Jack Fist doing our sort of Jack is a legend. So it's weird to think that I'm in this field. How come? You know what I mean?

55:12Hannah Beachler:I don't know. Because I don't see myself there, right? I don't see myself as. Well, you've won an Academy Awards. I don't know what else is required to feel like you're part of the world. You know, because I fangirl out over these guys who, you know, I was watching when I was coming up because they were doing it, even Tamara. And, you know, Fiona and I are kind of in that boat. It's pinch yourself time. But there are so many good films out there right now. Are you watching these films with your production designer eyes or like, I'm going to the movies eating some popcorn? Or like, can you separate those two?

55:55Hannah Beachler:When it's other people's work, I'm going to the movies and eating popcorn. When it's my work, I tear it apart. Of course. Naturally. I'm curious. Maybe a last question here. Next film that you work on, and I know you're probably already working on something right now, but if you could just do anything you wanted, what type of film do you want to be a production designer on? What haven't you done that you really want to take a crack at? What world do you want to build? Exactly. Space. Space. I want to build space. I've always wanted to do that. I'm like, I want to, you know, literally build worlds.

56:35Hannah Beachler:I want a space odyssey. I want, I got close once. I want a Star Wars. I got close to that once. You know what I mean? I just, I really want to like, yeah, I want space. I want to go out into the universe and I want to build a whole universe. I want to see you do space real bad. I love that. I love that ambition. Yeah. something great to aim for. You do space. I've got to really lobby to get on set and watch that just so you know. Hannah, thank you. Thank you for making this time and this conversation. Thank you so much. It was great talking to y 'all. We'll be back in a minute with a brand new segment called Fix Your Shit.

57:27Okay, it's time for a new segment based on Mark's new Fast Company column called Fix Your Shit, the premise of which is Mark basically telling companies to fix their shit. Real deep metaphor going on here. So we're going to kick things off today with, I think, what is just the worst piece of software used by the most amount of people in the world today, Microsoft Teams. Such an easy target. I almost feel, I mean, I shouldn't have to say all this, but it's absolutely ridiculous that something is so bad used by so many people. So a little backstory, we transitioned to Microsoft Teams probably, I don't know, a year ago.

58:12It feels like a thousand years ago. I thought I didn't like Slack. And oh my gosh, Slack is a sort of luxury airliner compared to the piece of crap that is Microsoft Teams. It's like I said the first day of working and it was like being in an office building with no windows. Everything about the type and visual design of it is somehow oppressive. I agree with you. Microsoft Teams is really it's a hard thing to use. But can I just like flag the thing that makes me angriest at this very moment about Microsoft Teams? Yes. I don't know if you've noticed this, but they've started correcting grammar in Microsoft Teams.

58:53I must have perfect grammar. I think of that. Go ahead. When you misspell something, it will fix it for you. And misspellings is just vernacular of instant message. You can't fix misspellings. Like, that's like the whole thing. Like, you're like, this is real time communication. And on top of that, I know this is your column, Mark, but I have some thoughts, obviously. Last thing I'll say is now they're also capitalizing proper nouns. So if I type Mark, you're the only thing that's capitalize. That's so weird. So that's my contribution to this rant. I haven't noticed Mark yet, but I will be soon.

59:28I mean, so the first thing I hated about Teams was just like sending a message, which was like, you know, the message threads are formatted like email, unless you turn that off, which is so weird, right? Like when you say good morning, like it shouldn't, there shouldn't be a header that says good morning and like needs more commentary. The other thing is that the whole metaphor of communicating in these stacks is broken. I mean, you have dozens of conversations happening at a time. If you map that to a physical space, it would be like 10 meetings going on at once and then expecting that someone sat in on them all.

1:00:07I just like constantly am missing information that's being passed around. Somehow it's worse on Teams than it was on Slack. It was already bad on Slack. It was already bad on Slack. Yeah. But I think the other thing is like its biggest sin is it doesn't leverage its own monopoly and its own capabilities, right? So what I'm saying by that is why can't I check my email in Teams? Why do I have to go to Outlook separately to do that? Oh, my God. You know what would be a killer feature is if they would – if you're trying to like send it, like give somebody an email. I did this the other day where like someone asked for an email.

1:00:39Why do I have to go into my email, search for the email, copy and paste it, and put it in Teams? Like, why can't I just at, like, type the email and it pops up in my team's chat box? Like, that's like, it's already integrated with my Outlook. Yeah, yeah. You want this advanced feature. I just want a damn tab that lets me open my effing email. You know what I mean? It's not an advanced feature. That baseline isn't even there. I'm with you. Yeah. I like that idea. Today I had a meeting. The person was out of office. I didn't see the out of office. Teams let me just go into the meeting and hang out there for 10 minutes.

1:01:12it knows that person's out of office. Why the hell didn't it tell me, right? When someone messages you a file and it's in OneDrive and you somehow don't have access to the file, even though they just sent you the damn file, what is Microsoft doing that it sort of has all of these different dumb pieces of software, it's half rolled up into this like crap ball and then like, oh, they don't actually work together though. They're like still all independent pieces. I don't know. I just feel like every day I'm in Teams is a little worse. The final thing that like really broke me was going on vacation recently and just wanting to turn off notifications.

1:01:53So you go into Teams to do that. And it looks like at first, like there's a toggle to turn off notifications. There is no toggle to turn off notifications. There are several different options on how you want to tune many different types of notifications. And there's like over a dozen of them between different app measures and things. If you want to turn them off, you have to go to system settings within iOS or something. You have to do it that way. You have to be like, Teams no longer has access to my phone because I guess ultimately what Teams is is just this evil corporate engagement play where they do want to keep people working more.

1:02:29They don't want to add to our sanity. They don't want to clarify information. And I guess that's what I got to say about Teams. I just don't know how a company as valuable as Microsoft with the install base that they have has created something that's so bad and makes people so miserable. I have never met a single human being who likes Teams. Can I say one other thing about Teams that is sort of like rage-baity? I've sort of grown to like the emoji. They're so bad that they're almost good. Like, at first I was very embarrassed to use them because, you know, you have like this like goofy-ass smiley face that is ridiculous.

1:03:04But now I kind of like it. it's so silly that it's almost pleasant to look at. I mean, it's almost like a wild protest of everything else that Teams is, right? Like it is so exuberant. It is trying to break out of this cage of Teams. No, I actually like their emoji work. I wrote about it a few years ago. I think it's like, it feels a little bit different and it is totally extra and I'm here for it. So there you go. Fix your shit, Microsoft Teams. Accept the emoji. Those can stay. That's all for this episode. Thanks for listening. By Design is produced by Cody Nelson with mix and sound design by Nicholas Torres.

1:03:42Our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Remember to subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next time.