Stefan Sagmeister was born on August 6th, 1962. He is a New York-based graphic designer, storyteller, and typographer. Sagmeister co-founded a design a firm called Sagmeister & Walsh Inc. with Jessica Walsh in New York City, a full-services studio creating strategy, design and production across all platforms. Sagmeister got an interest in design between the age of fourteen to fifteen. He started to work for a little local magazine, but quickly found out that he referred the design part much more than the writing. At the same time, Sagmeister played in bands, which led him to became interested in album covers. That set the trajectory for Sagmeister to apply to design school when he was eighteen. He applied for the University of Applied Arts Vienna and got rejected at first. He then reapplied a year later and recieved a scholarship to study in New York at Pratt Institude. After the got his Master degree, he spent two years in Hong Kong and learned about how to start a company from the ground up. He then started his own company afterwards. medium.com
“Right now we spend the first twenty-five years of our life learning, the next fourty years working, another fifteen years in retirement, and then we die. It is more beneficial for me to take five of my retirement years and insert them into my working years. Not only are these years off pleasurable and productive for myself, but this way the ideas coming during these breaks go back into society, rather than benefiting just a grandchild or two.�
- Stefan Sagmeister, 2006
In 1993 Stefan Sagmeister announced the opening of his graphic design studio with a dick joke featuring his own, very exposed founding member. It was shocking (and funny), but he had the smarts to back up the provocation—and it had the desired effect, both for his business and his reputation. The idea was to design for the music industry and stay small then the company branched out later on. It all happened in his apartment and stayed there for fifteen years. Started work at 9:30 or 10am and ended it at 7pm. No work on the weekends. He practices sabbatical every seven years, in which, he will shut down his company and not taking any client
works. He said, “After seven years at the studio, I knew I still loved New York very much and that I had no real reason to move anywhere else. But I wanted to create a little artificial gap to allow for reconsidering what I was doing. I also realized I was having less and less fun in the office, and knew I had to do something about that; I knew if my happiness in the studio went away, everything would go down the drain. It has been almost six years since I’ve been back to work. I now have a fairly good perspective about whether or not this was worthwhile. And I would say very enthusiastically, yes, it was worthwhile.” By following the sabbatical practice, he was able to learn
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more about himself as a person. Stefan realizes that the anger he sometimes had toward clients was not necessarily about the clients. It was within him. When he didn’t have clients to tend to, he was just angry, or not angry, as he was before. One of the things he realized that year was that there was a certain amount of anger in himself that was fairly unclient-related. In 2012, Stefan Sagmeister asked Jessica Walsh to be his bushiness partner. In an interview with Howdesign, he explained the reason behind it was to keep Jessica. He didn’t want her to go off and start her own agency. He thought there were many things they might be able
to try out together. Even so, both of them maintained a small agency because they can be in creative control of everything that comes through the door. Sagmeister and Walsh also have the flexibility and freedom to pursue the kind of work that is important to them.
Happiness researcher and graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister
“When I thought about why I actually get out of bed in the morning or why I do the things that I do, the very end results of what I am doing or the reasons why I am doing it, seem to be connected to well being or happiness. And I though maybe it would be worthwhile seeing if happiness could be pursued more directly�
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1) When opening your in-box in the morning, single out one mail for a special thank you/praise. 2) Exercise. 3) Have low expectations and display incredible surprise and joy at the anomaly of something – against expectations – always going right. What advice would you give to people who are looking for more happiness in their everyday, daily lives?
As an influential designer, Stefan Sagmeister also deals intensively with philosophical topics, including the question: What is happiness? In his personal quest for happiness, Sagmeister conducted several self experiments, including practicing meditation exercises and testing moodlifting pharmaceuticals. He documented the results of his happiness research in an internationally celebrated exhibition “The Happy Show” and in his documentary “The Happy Film”. He discovered that happiness and art are closely linked.
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Mr. Sagmeister, can a designed product make someone happier? Right now over 50% of the world’s population live in cities. For this part of the population, everything around them has been designed, from the contact lens, to the cloth, the chair, the room, the house, the street, the park, the city. These designed surroundings play exactly the same role for a city dweller as nature does for an indigenous person living in a rain forest. They can be designed well or badly. They will make a difference. There are of course many products out there that do make our life easier, but we tend to only notice them when they fail badly. I can be in a plane going up and completely ignore the fact what an incredible piece of design it really is. I’ll only really notice it when it crashes.
Do you think that happiness is necessary to be creative? Or, instead, the ‘bad life’ of some artists is an ingredient that increases creative possibilities? I myself do much, much better when I’m in good shape. I am also more useful to other people. When I am not doing well, I create nothing. Sometimes it’s possible to look back and make a piece about the time when I was not doing well, but during the period itself, my productivity and creativity are very low.
How do you get your ideas? Do you feel truly happy while working? And if so, can you describe the feeling?
What has been the happiest moment of your work-life?
Ideas come from everywhere, just hopefully not from other graphic designers. I can be inspired by pretty much anything, a long train ride, a Renaissance painting, a piece of music, a newly occupied hotel room and it is interesting to translate that into the world of design. And yes, I can feel truly happy while working.
Here is a little excerpt from my diary about a happy moment connected to work. When I first met Mick Jagger (while we designed Bridges to Babylon) I asked him about his favorite Stones covers and he mentioned without hesitation: Exile on Main Street, Sticky Fingers and Some Girls. I said, “We should have an easy time working together since I would have told you exactly the same covers only in a different order: Sticky Fingers, Some Girls and Exile on Main Street”. Charlie Watts turned to Jagger and asked in a lowered voice: “What’s on Sticky Fingers?” to which Mick replied: “Oh, you know Charlie, the one with the zipper, the one that Andy Warhol did”. Good times.
Especially when I’m engaged in a craft I can get lost in. Other thoughts fall away; time falls away as I’m truly engaged in doing my best. It’s what the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow. Many people manufacture that feeling with computer games, because they are designed to engage them – through the various levels of difficulty – and bring them to the edge of their capabilities.
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Sagmeister originally wanted to cover the general happiness, but since it was too broad, he decided to focus on his own happiness instead. The Happy Film is a documentary within a documentary- an exploration into human happiness through the lens of his own life. Seven years in the making, The Happy Film began as
an attempt to find a design solution to a pressing problem: Sagmeister was at his creative peak, but he wasn’t very happy. At the time, he was reeling from the death of his mother and a difficult break up with his girlfriend of eleven years; his happiness, frankly, didn’t stand a chance. But as a designer who methodically confront challenges with creative solutions for a
living, it was frustrating to suddenly have a problem he couldn’t solve. He said, “I’m doing them because there is some sort of a far-end goal that I would actually be happy afterwards. I started looking at the design world from that point of view and ultimately did the talk on the design of happiness — exploring Can design make a user or a viewer happier? And can we
How happy are you today? become happier as designers? That presentation had always good feedback. The ultimately in Bali I decided to make a film about it.”
period he would track his progress and, at the very end, calculate his happiness number based on a rigid system he’d devised to measure his emotional Sagmeister embarked on well-being. Then he would the three-part happiness take a break, come back to experiment that consisted of “normal,” and begin the next isolated, month long periods experiment period. At the spent first meditating, end, all he’d have to do is then in therapy, then look at the numbers to see using prescription drugs. what worked. During each experimental
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Why Aren’t We
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Happier? LOS ANGELES — Somehow, our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have become life, liberty, and happiness. Happiness — not merely its pursuit — is now something to which we are entitled. Which we deserve. Which capitalism, with its eternal seduction, has convinced us should be available with each and every purchase. And if we are not happy, something (the right product? the latest gadget?) is missing. Because we should be happy all the time. Art, in 21st-century America, is in a state of crisis. Budgets have been slashed, classes cut, and a stigma attached to the very practice of making art: it is not useful, and by not being useful, it is not necessary. Drones are useful. Oil is useful. Math and science are, occasionally, useful. But art?
fact, our happiness quotient can be determined by several specific choices.
And yet, we are not.
Art, in 21st-century America, is in a state of crisis. Budgets have been slashed, classes cut, and a stigma attached to the very practice of making art: it is not useful, and by not being useful, it is not necessary. Drones are useful. Oil is useful. Math and science are, occasionally, useful. But art? Art is frivolous. Even when aesthetically satisfying — which, to be honest, it is not always — art still has no real “productive”component. At least not the kind that can be
So what are we doing wrong? According to Stefan Sagmeister: The Happy Show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, it is not simply that there are happy people and unhappy people, or people who are flawed and people who are “perfect.” In
This is not the only radical statement made by Stefan Sagmeister’s art. The other radical statement is that it is even art in the first place.
justified on a budget spreadsheet. The thing about art, though, is that it is sneaky. It keeps reinventing itself. It has a stubborn habit of responding to the zeitgeist and asserting its cultural relevance. It makes you think. Just when you think you have defined what art is, you realize you have no idea what it is not. Pre-postmodernism, pre-readymades, pre-Duchamp, The Happy Show would have been met with confusion, if not outright derision. Even today, there are probably many who would dismiss it as more contemporary art shenanigans. Where are the paintings? Where is the craft? It is more a science project, notes and graphs scribbled on the wall, quirky statements with the occasional lewd image. How is this even art? At best, it is design. Or maybe typography. Why is this here, in a museum? Taking up space and time? While fine art has been languishing, subject to those aforementioned budget cuts and a shift in contemporary priorities, we are more obsessed with design than ever before. And design, unlike art, is embraced by America, because, in stark contrast to art, it always has a purpose, a reason, an intention. (Art on the other hand, is less didactic; it wants you to think or feel but does not always insist upon what.)
is art if it does not make you think? What is art if not everything that Sagmeister has drawn and scribbled upon these walls? The exhibit opens with a disclaimer. “This exhibition will not make you happier,” proclaims Sagmeister’s text, black bold letters on a bright yellow wall that faces you headon as you enter the museum. Before you see anything, before you have rounded the corner, Sagmeister wants to be very clear. This is not a show about empty promises, or promises at all. He, unlike capitalism, is not out to seduce. Instead, this show is a contemplative exploration of one man’s attempt to find happiness — with a lot of that bright yellow and black text. Contemplative it is, since wandering through the exhibit feels like wandering through Sagmeister’s head or diary, exploring his thoughts as he provokes ours. Notes and graphics are scrawled on every available wall surface (bathroom stalls! elevator doors! in the stairwell! around the fusebox!), thoughtful revelations and whimsical imagery interspersed with facts and statistics gathered from the social research of people like psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Steven Pinker, and there is even a mounted bicycle you are encouraged to ride, since riding it lights up a neon sign.
This prompts an interesting question: Is art as we know it dead? Has art, like literature and all of the humanities, become a cloistered, monastic, insider practice, while design is available to everyone through magazines, furnishings, apparel, and shows like this one?
The exhibit also features an excerpt from a feature length film Sagmeister is working on that explores whether we can train the mind to be happy much as we train the body. Perhaps the secret to happiness, he posits, is actually to be found via research, science, and planning. Perhaps, for instance, something as simple as the occasional year-long break from work, rather than working straight through until retirement, would result in increased productivity and enjoyment.
And then you realize that, much as Sagmeister is encouraging you to redefine your idea of happiness, he is also encouraging you to redefine your idea of art. What is art, after all, if not an exploration of the artist’s consciousness? What is art, after all, if not a visual response to life? What is art if not a way of processing emotions and feelings about the world around us? What
In the entrance, Sagmeister emphasizes that low expectations are a good strategy, and so we should lower ours before entering his version of an artist’s journal, before even beginning to think about happiness. Like a nervous kid on a date, he wants to make sure we are not expecting miracles. Ironically, however, lower expectations may also be key to finding happiness.
Sagmeister, as the exhibit’s wall text tells us, is “a designer who blends typography and imagery in striking, fresh, ambitious, and unsettling ways,” and Sagmeister has made a career out of doing this. Beyond simple product packaging, his creations are known for their unorthodox approaches and unconventional results. I.D. magazine writes that Sagmeister’s “CD package designs are what poetry is to prose: distilled, intense, cunning, evocative and utterly complete. His intentions have set a new standard.”
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Sagmeister received a Grammy Award in 2005 in the Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package category for art directing Once in a Lifetime box set by Talking Heads. He received a second Grammy Award for his design of the David Byrne and Brian Eno album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today in the Grammy Award for Best Recording Package category on January 31, 2010. In 2005, Sagmeister won the National Design Award for Communications from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. In 2013 Sagmeister was awarded the Golden Medal of Honor of the Republic of Austria.