Editorial by Jadekellywork01

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Stefan Sagmeister Robert Massin Bruno Monguzzi Vince Frost Jamie Reid Paul Rand

Stefan Sagmiester A renowned Austrian-born US based contemporary graphic designer and typographer. His intriguing and provocative designs redefined the status of graphic designers. In this editorial,

(Pervious Spread) Stefan Sagmister Portrait by Victor G. Jeffreys III https://the-talks.com/interview/ stefan-sagmeister/ https://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_ time_off

Stefan Sagmeister born August 6, 1962 in Bregenz, Austria. Stefan is a renowned contemporary graphic designer and typographer. He is the co-founder of the famous design firm, Sagmeister & Walsh, which he established in partnership with Jessica Walsh. His intriguing and provocative designs redefined the status of graphic designers. Some of his notable designs are showcased on the album covers of The Rolling Stones, Pat Metheny, David Byrne and OK Go.A cunning trickster turns convention upside down, stretches the bounds of propriety, stomps on mores and taboos and alters popular perceptions. Sagmeister has long fit this “bad boy” bill. Known for upsetting norms, he tricks the senses through design, typography, environmental art, conceptual exhibitions and, lately, video. Long ago, Sagmeister, whose motto was “Style=Fart,” replaced style with attitude. His designs are rooted in disorienting images and self-defining aphorisms. With apparent ease, Sagmeister morphs—as tricksters are wont to do—taking on various skins, from graphic designer to conceptual typographer to performance artist. When the mood strikes, he returns to being a designer, and a completely new cycle of transformation commences. For an AIGA lecture in 1999, he famously had the lettering for the event poster carved into his naked body; for his 2003 “Sagmeister on a binge” exhibition poster, he ate 100 different junk foods, gaining more than 25 pounds, and took “before” and “after” photographs of his seminude body. For a short typographic film, he dangled precariously out of an upper-story window of the Empire State Building as police scrambled with nets below. The list goes on. After graduation from high-school, he enrolled himself in an engineering college. However, he later changed his mind and opted for graphic designing course. Since an early age, Sagmeister had a passion for designing, thus it is as unsurprising that he began his designing career at the age of 15. He worked for an Austrian left-wing youth magazine, Alphorn. While he was covering Alphorn’s Anarchy issue, he had an ingenious idea to exercise the D-I-Y graphic for the first time. He persuaded his fellow students to lie down on the playground forming the letter A

and took a picture from school roof for the poster of the magazine. At the age of 19, he applied for the University of Applied Arts Vienna to study graphic designing. Although, at first he was refused the admission on the basis of his amateur drawing, his application was accepted on second attempt. In 1987, owing to his remarkable performance, he earned a Fulbright scholarship for the New York based Pratt Institute. For mandatory military services, Sagmeister returned to Austria after three year of studies in United States. He chose to do community service for refugee center instead and afterwards remained in Austria for a while. In Austria, he continued to pursue graphic designing and then moved to Hong Kong in 1991. He was landed a job as a typographer in an advertising agency. In 1992, the agency was asked to design a poster for the 4As advertising awards ceremony. Sagmeister had a strange sense of humor and never took issues of propriety into consideration. So when he presented an inappropriate and unethical poster for the event he was lambasted by the audience. A few months later, he decided to move back to New York City. In New York, Sagmeister briefly worked at M&Co studio, which sponsored his green card application. As the studio was closed and moved to Rome, he set out to establish his own. Having keen interest in music, he decided to work on music graphics but only endorsing the music he prefers. In 1993, he founded the Sagmeister Inc. At first none of the record labels approached him for the album cover designs. So when his friend was about to launch his album he seized the opportunity to design the CD cover for Zinker’s Mountains of Madness. Using the optical illusion, he made the CD cover more tantalizing for the consumers, and his incredible zeal for innovative designs earned him four Grammy nominations for his cover. Inspired by his work, Lou Reed requested him to design cover for his album, Set the Twilight Reeling, in 1996. It was followed by the cover he designed for David Byrne’s album Feelings featuring the GI Joe-style doll. In addition, Sagmeister Inc. has employed designers including Martin Woodtli, and Hjalti Karlsson and Jan Wilker, who later formed Karlssonwilker. Stefan is a long-standing artistic collaborator with

His motto is “Design that needed guts from the creator and still carries the ghost of these guts in the final execution.”

musicians David Byrne and Lou Reed. He is the author of the design monograph “Made You Look” which was published by Booth-Clibborn editions. Solo shows on Sagmeister, Inc.’s work have been mounted in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Japan, Osaka, Prague, Cologne and Seoul. He teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Arts in New York and has been appointed as the Frank Stanton Chair at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York. Since, Stefan Sagmeister has promoted brands, music and entertained diverse range of clients such as the Guggenheim Museum, HBO, AIGA and Time Warner through his captivating designs.

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. Other nominations include: The DocAviv Film Festival 2016 Nominee for Best International Film for The International Competition: The Happy Film (2016) Shared with: Hillman Curtis and Ben Nabors The Grammy Awards 1998 Nominee for Best Recording Package For “Fantastic Spikes Through Balloon” The Grammy Awards 1997 Nominee for Best Recording Package For “Miracle Of Science” and Best Recording Package For “Set The Twilight Reeling” The Grammy Awards 1996 Nominee for Best Recording Package For “Mountains Of Madness” Tribeca Film Festival 2016 Nominee for the Jury Award and Best Documentary Feature; The Happy Film (2016) Shared with: Ben Nabors Hillman Curtis Stefan goes on a yearlong sabbatical around every seven years, where he does not take work from clients. He is resolute about this, even if the work is tempting,

Stefan Sagmiester 1, 2

It is very important to embrace failure and to do a lot of stuff — as much stuff as possible — with as little fear as possible. It’s much, much better to wind up with a lot of crap having tried it than to overthink in the beginning and not do it.

and has displayed this by declining an offer to design a poster for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Stefan spends the year experimenting with personal work and refreshing himself as a designer. On the stage at the TED Global conference in Oxford, England. There he presented his findings about the power of time off, he spoke specifically about the virtues and values, personal and professional, of taking a sabbatical every seven years, something he started to do in 2000 and has continued to practice since. Coming in the midst of the Great Recession, the TED Talk resonated widely: its resulting video has been watched more than three million times. Clearly, Sagmeister was, and is, onto something. Even if it’s something most people can only dream about. Since then, Sagmeister has gone on yet another sabbatical—his third, in 2016—this time stopping in Mexico City, Tokyo, and the town of Schwarzenberg, Austria, over the course of a year. (For his first sabbatical, he was in New York City; for his second, Bali. On this episode of Time Sensitive, the 56-year-old looks back, with a fuller-picture view, at his three periods of time off. Digging in to how the sabbaticals created opportunities for incubating ideas that became two massive multi-year undertakings—one a project on happiness, the other on beauty—Sagmeister shares with Spencer Bailey how certain things have changed for his practice since that TED Talk a decade ago. In 2012, he joined forces with Jessica Walsh; their firm, Sagmeister & Walsh, now operates in a different, slightly larger office than the one he was in, and having another partner at the firm has shifted how things run overall. Still, Sagmeister’s signature approach to design remains as exuberant as ever. For clients including the duffel-bag brand Baboon, the Jewish Museum, and the Miami advertising agency Gut, the firm continues to produce inventive and playful work. Now, Sagmeister has announced that he will cease to work on all commercial assignments, and will instead, focus on his self-generated design projects, such as Beauty. During lockdown Sagmister gets up at 6:30 and works out on his roof – using a virtual reality. He then normally in the studio by 8:30am, the commute being a spiral staircase up from my apartment,” he explains.

Illy Espresso Cups https://sagmeister.com/work/illy-espresso-cups/

(Next Spread) The Happy Show https://sagmeister.com/work/thehappy-show/

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The Happy Film https://sagmeister.com/work/thehappy-film-/

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(Pervious Spread) The Happy Show https://sagmeister.com/work/thehappy-show/

Yes! Dumbo Improvement district https://sagmeister.com/ work/yes-dumbo-improvement-district/

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David Byrne and Brain Eno “Everything That Happens...” https:// sagmeister. com/work/ david-byrneand-brian-enoeverythingthat-happens/

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(Pervious Spread) Beauty https://sagmeister.com/work/ beauty https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ btuafbbn85sx4h6/AADKT0OdwGit33Ehf63Tz0dTa?dl=0

In partnership the fascinating exhibition project “Beauty”, Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh make a multimedia, highly sensory plea for us to take delight in beauty. Almost throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, beauty (has) had rather negative connotations in the design discourse. Sagmeister & Walsh counter this antipathy with convincing arguments and make it possible to experience beauty as a key and functional aspect of appealing design. Spreading across the entire MAK on Vienna’s Stubenring, the exhibition taps into all the senses and clearly demonstrates that beauty is more than merely a superficial strategy. In the MAK Columned Main Hall, the MAK DESIGN LAB, the MAK GALLERY, the MAK Works on Paper Room, and the MAK Permanent Collection Contemporary Art, a combination of installations produced especially for the exhibition and examples from product design, city planning, architecture, and graphic design encourages visitors to see, smell, and feel. Supported by findings from the field of psychological aesthetics, Sagmeister & Walsh offer evidence that beautifully designed works stimulate human perception and are hence more effective. Divided into six thematic areas – “What Is Beauty?”, “The History of Beauty,” “In the Eye of the Beholder,” “Experience Beauty,” “Transforming Beauty,” and “The Beauty Archive”– some 70 groups of objects stimulate an aesthetic discourse on beauty as the paradigm of high-quality design. As a centerpiece of the exhibition, the Sensory Room, jointly designed with Swarovski, taps into the visitors’ entire range of senses. A sensuously designed white cube invites visitors to enter. The outer shell of this installation in the MAK DESIGN LAB was developed in close collaboration with the creative team at Swarovski: thousands of Swarovski crystals sparkle in ornament designed by Sagmeister & Walsh, endowing the room with a special charm. Inside, the visitors—shrouded in fog – encounter the ever-changing colors of the sunset. Scents that are considered “beautiful,” like citrus, and an acoustic backdrop of the song of the Malaysian tree frog facilitate an unparalleled experience of beauty. When you leave this room in the MAK exhibition, you feel calm and peaceful.

Bearing projections, the spectacular smoke screen Fog Screen transforms the main entrance to the MAK on the Stubenring, immediately leading visitors to ponder the fundamental question: “What is beauty?” Discussed by countless philosophers and scientists, the question of what makes something beautiful is answered with facts by Sagmeister & Walsh: beautiful things have a direct effect on our dopamine receptors and on our feelings, meaning that beautiful design can indeed be perceived as effective.

Sagmeister & Walsh define symmetry as a universal component of what we find beautiful. They corroborate this thesis with several installations: among other things, visitors can generate symmetrical structures with an interactive app and then order a tote bag with that structure printed on it via the app. A flock of birds projected onto a large screen whose density and speed can be controlled proves that there tends to be a preference for balanced patterns. Beauty has always been a defining factor in the choice of mate, reproduction, and evolution. We experience positive emotions when we see beauty. In the exhibition area “The History of Beauty,” examples from all eras of human history leave no doubt about our desire for beauty. What we find sexually attractive is not just physical beauty, but also the ability to create beautiful things. That was already true in the prehistoric period: there was no justification for sharpening stone axes symmetrically, yet with their eye for symmetrical design and their fine motor skills, the attractiveness of the producers of these tools increased. The negation of beauty is also addressed comprehensively in the context of this exhibition area. Aesthetic preferences are less subjective than generally believed. In the chapter “In the Eye of the Beholder,” remarkable similarities are detected in various cultures and periods. Just how universal our understanding of beauty is,

is illustrated among other things by visualiz ing research by Chris McManus, psychologist at University College London: 85 percent of study participants can instantly differentiate between a work by Piet Mondrian and a slightly altered forgery. Here, Sagmeister & Walsh once again invite visitors to interact: there are coins stamped onto the admission ticket, which visitors can use to vote for their favorite forms. Color perception is the subject of The Color Room. Coated in intense blue and pink patterns, at regular intervals this room is lit with a special light, which makes certain color hues appear gray. Colorfulness is generally considered more beautiful. Beauty has the transformative potential to improve the world, as becomes clear in the exhibition area “Transforming Beauty.” Among other things, the installation From Garbage to Functional Beauty shows how the unconventional French designer Thierry Jeannot works with Mexican garbage collectors to make stunning chandeliers out of waste plastic. “Beauty” concludes with a “Beauty Archive” curated by Sagmeister & Walsh featuring the MAK’s officially most beautiful exhibits: a best-of of objects that have been declared beautiful by the museum. “SAGMEISTER & WALSH: Beauty” is already the third exhibition project jointly realized by Stefan Sagmeister and the MAK. In 2002/03 the MAK dedicated Handarbeit to Stefan Sagmeister, his first solo show in a museum. In 2015/2016 Sagmeister descended on the MAK with The Happy Show (28 October 2015 to 28 March 2016) and invited the public to take part in his captivating search for happiness. In spite of his success, Sagmeister is a very downto-earth, approachable guy, and was happy to answer some questions about his work on project Beauty. What aroused your interest in beauty and what was your thought process? “When I was a young designer I believed that it’s all about the idea and that form and style are secondary. I meet many young designers stating the same. After having been doing this for 30 years, I came to believe strongly this is wrong. Formal attributes including beauty are absolutely central when it comes to producing anything that should function well. About 10 years ago I went to a design conference at the Memphis Convention Center, and at the time I was still smoking and so I spent a lot of time outside by myself smoking. I remember looking around and I could see literally nothing where I felt beauty had played any sort of role in the decision why it was there. It was completely, utterly utilitarian. Not utilitarian in a form follows function sort of way. Rather, it was like, “How can we make this the cheapest, the fastest?” And the reason it had such an impact was because I had literally just come from a conference in Lisbon that was in the castle overlooking the city. It is a medieval castle so it was a military building—a defensive building—but every single doorknob on that

Stefan stated “I think was always a big advantage for Sagmeister and Walsh, because clients got the point of view from two completely different generations.”

castle was covered in patterns and was designed for beauty. This struck me as so strange: What happened to us? Why would we do this as a species? Can beauty alter our mood? “If you have ever visited both large train stations in Manhattan, you will have sensed the difference in mood right away. Grand Central, a grand 1903 built space feels somewhat uplifting and lovely at any time of the day. Penn Station, a dismal low-ceilinged 1970ies space, feels claustrophobic and depressing. We compared tweets coming out of either space, the ones from Grand Central tend to be positive, the ones from Penn Station negative. We are convinced that the terrible mood we find in numerous airports are also triggered by the terrible architecture. Does beauty play a role in preservation and sustainability? Beauty is a fantastic strategy when it comes to sustainability. Just look at the Pantheon in Rome, 2000 years old and it is still there, in use, because it is so incredibly gorgeous that no generation had the heart to tear it down. The same is true for a beautiful leather bag I have received as a gift 25 years ago. I’d rather have it repaired than purchase a new one. If you could chose anyone to collaborate on The Beauty Project, who would it be? Architects Herzog and DeMeuron, artist James Turrell, digital artist Nobumichi Asai, architect Philip Beesley. Why did you and Jessica decides to split your creative partnership? Stefan replied “Sure, I think that Jessica and I always worked with the best understanding, that we were going to do this for as long as we both [thought] it was an advantage for the two of us. And we had these, sort of, three-year letters of agreement, and we elongated those two times. Then, in the last time, we felt that Jessica actually wanted to enlarge the company, which I wasn’t really interested in. But this was not like, you know, that we fought over this, not at all. It was more like a feeling that Jessica wanted it to be bigger, and I actually was going in quite a different direction. I actually felt more comfortable with the company when it was smaller.”

Stefan Sagmiester 11, 12 Beauty https://sagmeister.com/work/ beauty/

Beauty https://sagmeister.com/work/ beauty/

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Beauty https://sagmeister.com/work/ beauty/

Stefan Sagmiester 1, 2 Stefan Sagmiester 15, 16 (Next Spread) Lou Reed https://sagmeister.com/work/ lou-reed/ Stefan Sagmister https://www.agda.com.au/ news/stefan-sagmeister-member-workshop

Inspiration How do you go about inspiration/having ideas? The process I’ve been using most often has been described by Maltese philosopher Edward DeBono, who suggests starting to think about an idea for a particular project by taking a random object as point of departure. Say, I have to design a pen, and instead of looking at all other pens and thinking about how pens are used and who my target audience is etc., I start thinking about pens using.(this is me now looking around the hotel room for a random object) bed spreads. Ok, hotel bedspreads are stickycontain many bacteria, ahh, would be pos Running the Studio Do you turn away projects? Yes. Because we never grew big (Tibor’s advice was: The only difficult thing in running a design studio is not to grow, everything else is easy), we do have the luxury of picking and choosing. We tend to work with clients who have products and services we do use or would use ourselves (this way we don’t need to lie), who are kind people, and who have appropriate deadlines and budgets.

csible to design a pen that is themo sensitive so it hanges colours where I touch it, yes, that could actually be nice: An all black pen, that becomes yellow on the touching points of fingers/hands, not so bad, considering it took me all of 30 seconds. Of course, the reason this works is because DeBono’s method forces the brain to start out at new and different points of departure, preventing it from falling into a familiar grove it has formed before. What inspires you? One of my most frequent sources of inspiration is a newly occupied hotel room. I find it easy to work in a place far away from the studio, where thoughts about the imwonderful. We are still friends with Karlsson/ Wilker, Martin Woodtli, Matthias Ernstberger, Joe Shouldice, Richard The and many others, and I am extra happy when I see something great that any of them have designed. M&Co., the company I used to work for before I started out on my own, left behind a giant legacy of design companies, and I always thought that that was one of Tibor Kalman’s crowning achievements.

What’s the best part Many of your protégés about maintaining a have gone off and creat- small agency? ed their own successful firms. Is it hard to keep We are not financially dependent on our clients, good talent? we have the freedom to I very much LOVE that. pursue unusual direcI think this is tions, we are nimble, we

plementation of an idea don’t come to mind immediately but I can dream a bit more freely. What is your biggest block to your creativity and how do you fight it? Boredom, uninteresting content and fear of not being able to come up with anything. Milton Glaser once told me that his proudest achievement in over 50 years of being a designer is that he is still interested and feels engaged. I myself find that sabbaticals to be the best cure.

are focused, we are re sponsible, we all get to design, and be involved in all aspects of the job, so we are not bored. There is little need for meetings. There is rarely any misunderstandings internally so what we design mostly gets produced. What motivates promotions?

your

I had opened the studio with a card showing me naked. That card turned out to be highly functional, not only did our then only client love it (he had put it up in his office with a note saying: The only risk is to avoid risk) but it attracted more clients who were likely of a moreadventurous nature. The card that announced the partnership between Jessica Walsh

Who inspires you? As an art student I was completely taken by a book about Storm Thorgerson and the work he did for Hignosis, the British design company that created all the album covers for Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and many others. They developed the most unusual ideas and employed impeccable craft to execute flawlessly. Right now I’m very much looking forward to the James Turrell show opening at the Guggenheim here in NYC, his exhibit at the MAK in Vienna was one of the most influential shows I had ever seen. Today I was inspired by an Ann Hamilton interview, where she was talked about creativity and her creative process. and myself was intended as a little joke on that opening card and turned out to have worked just as well: Everybody anywhere seems to know about that partnership (and that card). You said that the worst of urban architecture focuses almost entirely on function. Why is this a problem? I believe at fault is a general lack of regard for beauty. Most design centric professions, be it architecture, product or digital design don’t take beauty very seriously, with many practitioners seeing it as superfluous, while concentrating on function. I very strongly believe that the sole pursuit of functionality often leads to work that does not function at all.

How does the typography of “Things I have learned in my life so far” influence the transmission of the message? The message is always very clear and straightforward, the typography much more ambiguous and open for interpretation. I found that by utilizing an open typographic approach combined with the clear message many viewers have an easier time relating their own experience. We do employ various typographic strategies from one project within the series to another. Some are influenced by the environment they take place in, some by an outside person, some by personal experiences. Could you explain the purpose of the project “Trying to look good limits my life”? My grandfather was educated in sign painting and I grew up with many of his pieces of wisdom around the house, traditional calligraphy carefully applied in gold leaf on painstakingly carved wooden panels. I am following his tradition with these typographic works. Personal Questions What’s the biggest professional risk you’ve taken? How old were you? I was the most scared when deciding to take the first sabbatical in 1999. Our design studio was 7 years old, the first internet boom in full swing

All of them are part of a list found in my diary under the title: “Things I have learned in my life so far.” We displayed them in many cities around the world in places normally reserved for straightforward advertising. All of them were commissioned by clients. For example, broken up into 5 parts “Trying/to look/ good/limits/my life” and displayed in sequence as typographic billboards, worked like a sentimental greeting card left in Paris.

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Things He’s Learned

What is some bad advice given in the design industry? That our work is all about solving problems. Solving problems is for accountants and engineers. We can do so much more. We can delight! I can have an experience of true beauty (one of real awe at the gorgeousness of it all) when I look at the New York skyline and when I look at the Austrian Alps, both places I know well: I have lived close to either for more then 20 years each. Considering it took nature about 200 million years to build the Alps, but New Yorkers years, I am somehow more impressed with New and everybody was in the business of making lots of money. It just seemed unprofessional to close the studio for a year to try out things. unprofessional to close the studio for a year to try out things. Why did you feel you needed sabbaticals?

Yorkers. The form of the Empire State built the skyline in 200 building does NOT follow function, but it functions much better as a building than all the 1970ies skyscrapers built under the term of functionalism. Outwardly our last year with clients had been the most successful to date, we had won the most awards in our brief company history and the then boomingcoffers. But actually I was bored. The work became repetitive.  At the same time I went to Cran brook giving a workshop andactually got rather relous of all

the mature students there being able to spend their entire day just experimenting. . Then Ed Fella came into the studio and showed me all the notebooks with his freewheeling typographic experiments. That did it. I settled on a date a year in advance and I called up all my clients.