Designer insight: Laura Perron
Posted by Huwbot,
Many LEGO set designers use our BrickLists feature to maintain a list of the sets they've worked on and often provide interesting insights about their involvement.
Once a week we publish an entry from one of their lists on the home page to increase awareness of this information and to encourage more designers to create them.
Laura Perron wrote this about their work on 21336 The Office:
This was a complete dream to be a part of! I saw that it was gaining votes fast on LEGO IDEAS, so I reached out to the Creative Lead, Sam Johnson, to say that if this goes through the review process I need to be a part of it. It did indeed go through, but there was some concern about the workload of taking on this product while still working full time on the DOTS theme. So I asked, what if Chris worked on it too?
Chris Perron is an incredible designer, avid Office fan, and also happens to be my husband. Not going to lie, some people were hesitant to have a husband and wife team work on it together, but I think we proved that it worked! We had watched the series together so many times, it was so easy to work with Chris on it. We had a lot of great input from many colleagues who are also big fans of the show. The model that Fan Designer Jaijai Lewis submitted was an awesome design to start with, it was packed with so many great details.
We started with that as our base then continued to take it through the LEGO Design process. We wanted to make sure we got in as many jokes and references as possible! We would talk about it constantly, often in our kitchen while cooking dinner. One time Chris was in the shower and yelled out an idea for how to build the tan shelves. We joke that a good chunk of this set was actually designed in our living room. I listened to The Office Ladies podcast and read books and blogs about behind the scenes, shoutout to The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s: an Oral History by Andy Greene.
Together with Jaijai and the LEGO IDEAS team we poured a lot of love into this set and I am so happy with the result. What really tied this model together and took it to the next level, was the amazing Graphic Design work by Diego Sancho. Even before this idea got the green light, Diego had designed Jim, Pam, Dwight, and Michael in his spare time, so we all thrilled when he officially joined the project!
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22 comments on this article
It shows that a lot of love and reverence went into the build and the end result.
It's definitely the best 'sitcom studio' set.
This is a great designer diary. I think you can often tell with a set when the designer has really enjoyed making it. Thanks!
That is a great set!
As one half of a husband-wife team, I can totally relate to what a joy working with your spouse is! I read those bits about the kitchen and shower and thought “Yep, that happens to us, too!”
Hope they both get to do more projects together!
@Huw said:
"It's definitely the best 'sitcom studio' set."
I disagree, I think Seinfeld is more recognizable and captures the look of the set better than any other sitcom set. I’ve seen the office a lot, but I can’t say I’d instantly recognize the set unless I knew, but that’s not the case for seinfeld.
I thought 21319 Central Perk had a bit more variety in the build. The Office set had very similar builds for each of the desks and more or less plain walls. Maybe the smaller set just packed in more details so it seemed like there was something new and different every few pages of the instructions.
@Huw It falls short of both Jerry's apartment and Central Perk, but I love articles like this! It's always fun to hear the creative process behind a set :)
The best thing about this set is all the show references.
When building it, that was the most fun, going through each section, then seeing a specific element and/or sticker with the characters brings your mind right back to the show. That was the best about the build. And to get so many of these easter eggs in there was incredible.
Aesthetically Central Perk looks the best, the layout and colors, Seinfeld second and this a third for the sitcom builds (Friends Apartments fourth, Big Bang 5th-excellent accessories and torsos).
But with the show layout being awkward compared to the stage like set up for Friends and Seinfeld, this was a great job getting so much from the show into this footprint.
The designers did a great job, even though they had to leave out the accountants and Meredith/Creed desks and Darryl's office to make it a manageable build with good sight lines, those can be fun to moc to add on.
Just wish Ryan had a white shirt and tie instead of Jim's shirt, and Creed have a striped shirt with suspenders insteads of Michael's same torso.
Hopefully they'll do an Office CMF line. There's SOOO many iterations of characters to go through. Would be brilliant!
If it had been Slough based I would have bought it in a shot!
@Huw said:
"It's definitely the best 'sitcom studio' set."
Definitely? Not at all. I am a diehard fan of The Office and this set is very good. But from the 3 sitcom sets i have- Central Perk, Seinfeld, The Office - I find that order to be true- Central Perk is amazingly packed with details on such a smal footprint. The Office is much less complicated as a layout. But again- I am very happy that it exist and that I have my copy!
I love these designer insights!
One of the major design challenges in 2020s Lego is the gap between detailed interiors and great exteriors. It's incredibly challenging (and expensive) to recapitulate this level of detail in a building that has an actual exterior attached to it, and then you have to display it in such a way that actually permits people to see your work.
@Huw do you/someone from brickset handpick these bricklist entries, or does huwbot choose one at random?
@Zackula said:
" @Huw do you/someone from brickset handpick these bricklist entries, or does huwbot choose one at random?"
Huwbot picks one at random, like he does all the other random articles.
So when do we get the expansion with Andy and Erin?
Part of a warehouse expansion, or the small coffee shop that could also include Hank the security guard/barrista.
I can see it means a lot to those who have seen the 201 US episodes and can see all the references to different episodes but for the rest of us it just seems a very busy base-plate with too many mini-figs, although they have done well with only 1164 pieces as seems a lot more. I just prefer Lego Friends apartment 10292, probably as can relate more to the details with the canoe etc. and a single version was more international, rather than a dozen local remakes.
Being married to another AFOL, it's good to know there is at least one husband and wife team working for TLG. I wonder if they met there or actually got hired concurrently? Two paychecks would make relocation to Billund a lot more feasible...
Does anyone know what the blue and white checkerboard sticker behind Pam's desk is? I've seen it on the show but can't tell what it is. A poster of something? I'm a super-fan and never understood this feature.
I love this set since I've been a huge fan of The Office ever since my brother told me to watch the first season. My wife got this set for me for Christmas. Loved building it (except when my 4 year-old decided to rampage through the desks and pull most of the furniture out). However, most of my sets are destined to be displayed in the basement as part of a large city. I have no place else to display this...so I need to figure out what parts to order to make it into a 4-walled building with a roof. (I know there are some plans out there that make it part of a 2-story office building, but I honestly don't care for those and will come up with my own plan.
I just spent a full 5 minutes working out how to view this designer information on sets. I did get there in the end, I think. Am I right that it ONLY appears if you click through to the designer list by following their name, AND THEN change your display to 'List'. If you default it to 'Gallery' (as I do) or 'Table', no text appears and nor does any indication that there IS text to see. I was therefore super-confused trying to find this text on the item page, but this only shows the general 'about the designer' text under the 'bricklists' tab and not the item-specific text.
So I suggest that:
a) designer information about a set is surfaced in some way in all views of a bricklist, or at the very least a note is added that it is only visible in List mode.
b) that designer notes are visible or can be linked to in some way directly from a set (although I appreciate the problem here is that some are clearly brief placeholders - perhaps it can be based on a minimum length?)
@Huw said:
"It's definitely the best 'sitcom studio' set."
Maybe? This is the only sitcom out of the entire line-up that I actually like, so I'm able to appreciate it more. Maybe the other sets are fantastic, but I wouldn't be able to tell you since I just don't like those shows.
I did not know that this was a passion-project for a wife-and-husband team of builders, and I much enjoyed hearing the behind-the-scenes stuff. Like I said, I do like 'The Office (US)', and I enjoyed this set. Thank you for these insights.