Case Study: Stefan Sagmeister
Stefan Sagmeister
Born: 1962 Birthplace: Bregenz, Austria Occupation: Creative Director/ Founder of Sagmeister&Walsh Inc. Teaches: School Of Visual Art MFA Design Authorship
Other Jobs: Graphic Designer & Editor at Alphorn Magazine Freelance Designer in Austria Creative Director at Leo Burnett Advertising Department Creative Director at Leo Burnett Design Department Design Director at M&Co Founder/Creative Director at Sagmeister Inc. Founder/Partner/Creative Director at Sagmeister & Walsh
Main Concerns: Touching people’s hearts with design Sagmeister would like to create design that has the ability to act more poetically, like art, music, or film. Honesty Having something to say Design for non-designers
AIGA Biography: Inspirational and intriguing designer Stefan Sagmeister is recognized for his unorthodox, provocative designs that tweak the status quo and question the designer’s role in society. A cunning trickster turns convention upside down, stretches the bounds of propriety, stomps on mores and taboos and alters popular perceptions. Stefan 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 semi-nude 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. Born in Bregenz, Austria in 1962, Sagmeister began his unorthodox career at age 15 writing for Alphorn, a small, left-wing magazine, but quickly realized that working on the layout was more enjoyable than writing articles. He earned an M.F.A. at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna in 1985, and received a Fulbright scholarship to study at Pratt Institute in New York. Even as a young designer he was peripatetic: he took a position with the Leo Burnett Hong Kong Design Group in 1991. Surprisingly, the job did not trigger his atavistic rebellion, but it did give him a taste for other worlds. During his student days in New York, Sagmeister had courted another design bad boy, Tibor Kalman, of M&Co. “Tibor Kalman was the single most influential person in my design-y life and my one and only design hero,” Sagmeister told me. “Twenty-five years ago, as a student in NYC, I called him every week for half a year, and I got to know the M&Co receptionist really well. When he finally agreed to see me, it turned out I had a sketch in my portfolio rather similar in concept and execution to an idea M&Co was just working on. He rushed to show me the prototype out of fear I’d later say he stole it out of my portfolio. I was so flattered.” When M&Co eventually hired Sagmeister five years later, in 1993, Sagmeister discovered that Kalman had an uncanny knack for giving wisdom-laced advice, which had a deep influence on him as he began cultivating his own career. Perhaps most importantly, Kalman encouraged Sagmeister’s own creative restlessness: “Tibor was always happy and ready to jump from one field to another: corporate design, products, city planning, music videos, documentary movies, children’s books and magazine editing were all treated under the mantra, ‘You should do everything twice. The first time you don’t know what you’re doing. The second time you do. The third time it’s boring,’” Sagmeister said. After M&Co abruptly disbanded, when Kalman moved to Rome to edit Benetton’s COLORS magazine, Sagmeister began to specialize in CD cover design. “I get a bigger kick out of meeting some of my musical heroes than sitting in meetings with a marketing director, which I did a lot before I opened my own specialized studio,” he explained in an interview with me a dozen years ago. I.D. magazine, which in the late ’90s was Sagmeister’s most avid promoter, wrote that his “CD package designs are what poetry is to prose: distilled, intense, cunning, evocative and utterly complete. His intentions have set a new standard.” Designing for his musical heroes—Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, David Byrne and Jay-Z among them—enabled Sagmeister to create unique artworks based on the artists’ personas. He used printing and packaging tricks that involved laser-cuts, die-cuts, model building and more, but the witty, elegant and eclectic concepts were the engine that drove the outcome, and he received two Grammy Awards for his designs. During the early 2000s Sagmeister was totally invested in this genre and medium. In an interview, I asked him if he wanted to continue with this specialty or enter general practice. He responded in the affirmative without hesitation. I asked if he saw graphic design as a viable practice for future generations: “I personally believe that print is going to be around for a very, very long time,” he replied. “If I’m wrong, future designers will
have to be screen-based….I’d rather move to Sri Lanka and build a house than become a website designer.” But Sagmeister encountered a different vision of the future while on a trip to Seoul, South Korea, in 2003: the MP3 on handheld devices. After returning to New York, he substituted the record-packaging class he taught for the Designer as Author M.F.A. program at the School of Visual Arts with another course, reasoning that in two years or less the CD would be irrelevant—and so would its design. It was time for Sagmeister to reinvent his practice. In 2008, taking on other types of corporate and media work would have been axiomatic and fruitful, but instead, his next move was an unprecedented act of personal chutzpah: he announced a one-year sabbatical from all commercial work, and retreated to Bali. Was Sagmeister nuts? Would clients who relied on him remain loyal? Was this a trickster’s trick? True to form, he took the leap not knowing what the consequences might be. In return, he experienced one of those precious “aha” moments. It was during this sabbatical when, after deciding against learning how to direct film out of fear “I might devote a lot of time learning this new language and wind up having nothing to say,” he recalled, “it occurred to me I should try to stick with the language I do know how to talk, design, and see if I’d have something to say in it.” Thus was born Sagmeister’s text-based artwork, which fits nicely alongside the work of artists like Lawrence Weiner and Jenny Holzer, who use aphorisms and text fragments to express, either through poetic nuance or commanding declaratives, ideas designed to foster individual thought and group action. Sagmeister included a personal touch, building letterforms that both spell out and illustrate maxims pulled from his own diary: “Worrying solves nothing,” “Low expectations are a good strategy” and “Trying to look good limits my life.” Some were published in his second monograph, Things I have learned in my life so far. (Abrams, 2008), while others have appeared in magazines, videos and commercials.
AIGA Interview With Steven Heller: Style + Fart = Language
well to be spoken in that language. There is a certain content that is best spoke in a certain language (say love is easier declared in the language of a pop song than in architecture - the Taj Mahal notwithstanding). I think we made a good start with that whole “Things I have learned in my life so far” series (the current SVA subway poster is part of this).
On the occasion of his first New York retrospective, SAGMEISTER: MADE YOU LOOK, which runs at the School of Visual Arts (601 West 26th Street, 15th floor) from November 9 - December 11, 2004, the artist and designer was asked to reflect on his past and recent accomplishments. While tooting his own horn is not a favorite pastime, we did manage to get a few choice notes.
Sagmeister: I will stick with graphic design, and if I would direct a movie or write some music, it likely would still qualify as graphic design, me being a graphic designer and all.
Heller: It has been over two years since you took-off from the professional grind for a year to do your own work. Are you glad to be back? Is graphic design still an exciting way to spend your creative time? Sagmeister: Yes, it is. I learned shitloads in my year without clients, including making up my mind about all the fields I did not want to get into (but had imagined previously that I would). I surprised myself by getting up everyday at 6am to conduct little type experiments (with no deadline looming). I love this field. Heller: But, be honest. What don’t you love about this field? Sagmeister: I love limitations when designing a project. I don’t love limitations when they are revealed only after we designed the project. I don’t love unorganized clients. I don’t love that period when the deadline is looming and there is no idea yet with the pressure slowly mounting. Heller: This may seem like an unfair question (it certainly demands either modesty or immodesty), but can you describe what you believe is your contribution to the graphic design field over the past decade? Sagmeister: I agree this does seem like an unfair question. The unfair answer: I have no clue. I think I would like to think that maybe I made an impression: Maybe by bringing handmade type (again) to the forefront (one of my students at SVA MFA Design mentioned that half of her undergraduate class was doing writing on faces), or maybe by pointing towards the importance of design areas that don’t simply promote and sell. And I can say that the question of my contribution to the design field does not keep me up at night. Heller: Superficially, your work has some of the conceits of the age - a marriage of art/expression and design/communication - but retrospectively it is not just fashionable, trend-spotter stuff. You’ve never fallen into the style uber alles trap,as some have. How, particularly given your more cultural clients, have you avoided this? Sagmeister: When we started out in 1993 we had a style = fart sign hanging in the studio (it is no more) - we very consciously avoided any stylistic traps. In the meantime I have learned that good (and if necessary even trendy) style (and wonderful form) play an important role in delivering content to the viewer. But I never thought that graphic design has to be timeless. With very few exceptions (say highway signage) I love the fact that design starts to look dated after a while. Heller: So, what do you think is your most dated looking work, and why? Sagmeister: Among others, that Marshall Crenshaw CD looks rather old now, because of its holographic printing on the disc (in 1996 this was fresh), its op art patterns as well as the type set in rigid boxes Heller: Is there a piece of work that you wish you’d never put into the world? Sagmeister: Foremost our packaging for the computer shoot-them-up games Deathdrome and Slamscape. They were bad games, CD’s packaged in (largely empty) cereal-box-sized boxes in order to convey heftiness and a reason for the $60.00 prize tag. We made many mistakes, first by taking on a job I had no interest in (I am not into shot-them-up games), second by presenting lots of directions (the client predictably chose the worst) and last by not insisting to present to the decision maker, so changes kept on coming without me being able to do anything about them. Heller: With your School of Visual Arts retrospective exhibit it is easy to see what you’ve produced and for whom. But what do you actually want to achieve? What do you want out of graphic design? Sagmeister: Ultimately, it would be great to use it purely as a language: To produce content that lends itself
Heller: So is it safe to assume that you are able to express all that you want to “say” through the graphic design medium? Or do you foresee other media as potentially more efficient?
Heller: I asked before whether this is an exciting way to spend time, but is it a socially valuable way to spend it? Sagmeister: It is as valuable as the individual designer wants to make it. Just as you can be a socially conscious lawyer (or not), one can choose to be a socially valuable designer (or not). Heller: Okay then, what is a socially valuable designer? Sagmeister: Milton Glaser is a socially valuable designer. His persona and his designs are valuable (and belong) to the city of New York in a similar way Lou Reed’s songs are and do. I remember going to a horse race around November 2001, - half of the 50,000 people at the track wore the I HEART NY button, which, so close after 9/11, it was an incredible outpouring of support, a truly touching event. Milton’s symbol took on all the best (unifying) attributes of a great flag without any of its worst (excluding) ones. His contributions, as a founder of New York magazine, - the Blueprint for dozens of city magazines worldwide, Pushpin Studios the blueprint for hundreds of design studios worldwide and countless political and social campaigns go well beyond the city of New York and the field of graphic design. He is valuable to society. Heller: Do you truly believe that work you’ve done on behalf of Ben Cohen has made an impact on the public consciousness? Sagmeister: I do think Ben’s campaign had an impact. TrueMajority was successful in setting up one of the earliest oppositions to the war in Iraq (at a time when few mainstream groups came out against it), they were instrumental in uncovering the computer voting machine problem (the computer ate my vote), and now, together with Moveon.org play a role in voter registration and general opposition to the current regime. It is impossible for me to evaluate how much our graphic material helped them,I’m sure it did not hurt. Heller: And as a follow-up do you think of the public good whenever you create a piece of work? Sagmeister: No. And I don’t even have a set list of criteria either. But we do take on jobs with the question “Is this something the world needs” in mind. And erred a number of times, turned out the world did not need it after all. Heller: You’ve professed, and you’ve taught, the idea that design should indeed touch other human beings. What does this actually mean in a pragmatic way? Sagmeister: In one sentence: You look at a piece of graphic design and you have a moving experience. All of us were moved at one point or another by a piece of art, struck to the core by a movie, changed by a book, touched by a piece of music. Fewer of us experience this in front of a piece of design, - it is possible nevertheless. The last time it happened to me was a couple of months ago, when I was touched by a piece two of my students in Berlin were making. Heller: How did they touch you? Sagmeister: We held our final class exhibit in a building called the light tower, a 10-story renovated factory building with an added 5 story glass cube on top, situated in the Friedrichshain section of East Berlin, a young area comparable to Williamsburg in New York. The piece in question was a little kiosk, installed 1/4 mile from this tower, next to one of the busiest subway stations. The kiosk had two openings with lights shining out of them, which invited passersby to look in. As soon as you did, macro cameras inside the kiosk filmed your eyes, beamed the data to the light tower, and projected a full story high image of your eyes in real time from inside onto the light tower, transforming the entire building into a face with familiar eyes. When you blinked, your eyes on the tower blinked. I was touched by the experience itself and also by how much the population of Berlin loved it: People
stopped all night to look inside, watching their friend’s eyes transform the light tower into a face. For the people who were in the exhibition space inside the tower, the experience was totally different but touching nevertheless, whenever somebody looked into the kiosk, these gigantic eyes appeared in the space-like King Kong looking in. Heller: Whenever I view a retrospective of art or design, I try to sum up what all the work means. Is it simply a collection of disparate items that by its critical mass has relevance as a body, or is there an overarching philosophical, ethical,or whatever foundation. As you look at your collected work, what is the answer to this? Sagmeister: I think we are back into unfair question territory. You might try to sum it up, I could not. I can badly misquote one of our clients: Oh fine, its only graphic design. But I like it, like it, yes I do.
Sagmeister takes a sabbatical every 7 years to work on Self Set Projects His Self Set Projects diffuse into his professional practice
Website
The homepage features a live cctv footage of the studio.
The website shows that self-set work and client-set work together, and diffused, as a harmonious whole.
DVD packaging for the studio’s film.
The Happy Show featured is part of a research project undertaken by Sagmeister, which has been promoted in an exhibition.
There is a shop on the website, that monetises some of the famous work they have done in the past.
The website highlights how small the studio is. It was Sagmeister’s intention to keep it small from the beginning.
It’s very intersting how many diverse disciplines the small studio covers. I think this could be due to the philosophy he picked up off Tibor Kalman who noted you should do everything twice. The first time you do not know what you are doing, the second time you do, and the third time it is boring.
Notable Work
‘’’Graphic design is a language. So, of course, I can go and learn another language, like film or music (the two holding the biggest interest for me), and after some significant training I’ll be able to speak them in a way other people understand (and hopefully find interesting enough to watch and listen to). Or, instead of learning a new language, I can refine the one that I do know how to speak
- graphic design - and, much more importantly, figure out if I actually have something to say. It would be maddening to spend ten years learning how to direct a film only to find out I have nothing to say. It might be more romantic to say “I love you” in French that it is in Cantonese; nevertheless, it is still possible to say it. It might be more touching to say it in a song than in design, but saying it in design should be achievable , too. And it is possible to say “I love you” even in architecture, as the Taj Mahal proves.”’
Nancy Spector:
Steven Heller in Sagmeister: ‘He fervently believes - as did the late bad boy of graphic design Tibor Kalman, with whom he briefly worked in the early nineties - that design cannot be a neutral frame or decorative vessel but is an active ingredient in the comedie humaine.’ p3
’Simply “blurring” the boundaries between art and design - a rather facile trend of recent years - would never have been enough for his agile and mischievous mind. Instead, with Things I have Learned In My Life So Far, Sagmeister uses design masquerading as art to expropriate a space that is rightfully its own. And in the process, his design absorbs art’s essential, connotative freedom.’ p9 ‘Though Sagmeister emphatically, perhaps defiantly, describes the project as design, it intersects rather seamlessly with the kind of interventionist, public art, that it references.’ p12
For the last several days I’ve been reading a lot about probably one of the most provocative Graphic Designers of our generation – Stefan Sagmeister, an Austrian designer, who works in New York but draws his design inspirations while traveling all over the world. His designs are characterized by an overpowering honesty and raw feelings. He’s most famous for his CD cover designs for such well-known artists like Lou Reed, David Byrne, Aerosmith and the Rolling Stones. In one of his interviews Stefan said that when working on a project he prefers to start with the hardest part first and leave the easy things at the end, confessing later that the hardest part for him is the thinking one. I wonder how much thinking did he have to go through to come up with the scandalous concept of using his own body to deliver the message on the 1999 AIGA Detroit lecture poster? Most design lectures talk about the beauty of being a graphic designer. Stefan Sagmeister didn’t want to hide the painful truth about the “anxiety and angst” that accompany designer’s life. So he asked Martin, the intern working for Sagmeister, to cut the lecture details on his body with an X-acto knife, photographed it and used for a stirring AIGA poster. “We probably could have Photoshoped that AIGA Detroit poster, rather than cutting the type in my skin. I think the results are more authentic and the process more interesting (and painful)”, revealed Stefan. Questions to ponder upon One can only wonder what other extremes designers can go to in the name of design? Should Graphic Designers put their own emotions into the design, bring their own point of view into the concept or should they stay away from expressing their feelings and be as involved as needed? Stefan Sagmeister himself has changed his mind about this: “I used to think that it’s about problem solving and that the designer should stay out of it as much as possible. Having seen how much bland, forgettable work this kind of thinking produced, I now think that it is very important for the designer to bring his/her own point of view into the proceedings.”
And how important do you think it is to engineer more recreational time into our lives? Stefan: I suspect that the reason the bible recommends to take Sundays off as well every seventh year is grounded in social (rather than religious) reasons.
Questions
Do you see sabbatical/exploration as necessary to your creative development? Stefan: Yes. There are just so many things for which there never seems to be enough time for with the studio running at full speed. Sabbaticals insure that I can continue to see my work as somewhat of a calling instead of a 9-5 job. Was the open-endedness of the year intimidating? Was it difficult generating your own content entirely? Stefan: No. I discovered fairly quickly that my initial desire to conduct this year without a plan (“a vacuum of time�) was ill fated, and I came up with a very tight hourly plan. I looked through
my diary and wrote down all the instances where I had complained about how busy I am and that I would really like to do “X” if I would not be so busy. I added to this list, ordered them by importance into three, two and one hourly segments and wound up with a schedule, just like in grade school. This is your second in a seven-year cycle of “sabbaticals,” what gave you the idea to make this a regular part of your life? Stefan: The original impulse for the first one had many fathers, among them Ed Fella visiting the studio and bringing a number of his fantastic type experiments executed into a sketchbook with a 4 color ball point pen. When he self mockingly called it exit art I felt what a pity it is that one does this sort of stuff only with 60, it would have had a much bigger impact on a working life when it would be interspersed regularly throughout ones life. Tibor’s early death played a role as any death reminds us that our time here is finite and that we better use it a good as we can. As I did the first year
when I was 38, the second with 46, I have only two more years to go before the retirement age of 65. I think its much more useful to take those years early, divided up throughout my working life rather then pinning them to the end of it. Ferran Adria, who is considered by many as the best chef in the world, closed his restaurant north of Barcelona for 6 month every year while keeping a full kitchen staff in order to experiment. That’s 50% of his time for experimentation, compared with my paltry % 12.5%. What is your approach to work/life balance? Stefan: Seven years of work (with plenty of living) vs. one year of living (with plenty of work). I might change that into the future though to 9 months of work (with plenty of living) vs. three months of living (with plenty of work)
Interviews
Digital Arts: Interview: Stefan Sagmeister tells us the key to happiness & looks back on naked postcard Stefan Sagmeister tells us about The Happy Show, the possibility of it coming to the UK, and that naked postcard. This week, at the Reasons To Be Creative event in Brighton, designer Stefan Sagmeister of Sagmeister & Walsh took to the stage to talk mostly about his exhibition, The Happy Show, which is currently touring the world. We sat down with Stefan after his talk to find out more about the exhibition, the reasoning behind it and the accompanying documentary. Of course, we couldn’t leave without throwing in a question about the naked postcard, too. AA: The Happy Show is all about what makes people happy. Why did you choose to explore happiness? SS: “During my year in Bali, during my experimental sabbatical year, we made a whole bunch of furniture. The furniture idea was to explore something outside of graphics. Something that’s more three dimensional, and we needed furniture for the studio in New York. “A very close friend of mine came to visit, and he looked at all the furniture prototypes and he basically thought this was a waste of my time. “He thought that I should do something that’s somehow more useful. That I have a little platform and there is a responsibility that comes with that. And doing this furniture for our own studio was not a good use of my time. “At the time I didn’t really want to hear this, but after thinking about it I thought, yeah he has a point. And I was thinking what could it be that I would love to do but might also be useful to somebody else? “At that point I had given a talk quite a lot on design and happiness that always generated a whole bunch of great feedback. I thought maybe making a film about this would be juicy, because it would force me to do the research, it would be a challenge because I’ve never made a film, and there might be the possibility that if I make it personal, other people might be able to relate to it. AA: As part of your research, you found that happiness is based 40% on doing new activities, 10% on the state of your life and 50% in genetics. Where did you get your statistics from? SS: “I read roughly three dozen books and met many, many psychologists. “The stuff that I quoted comes mostly from three people. One is Jonathan Haidt from NYU. The second is Daniel Jacob at Harvard, and the third is Steven Pinker also at Harvard. But neither the film nor the show are really about the statistics. I am not a psychologist and I am not an expert on what makes people happy. Not at all. But I can talk quite authoritatively about what makes me happy, because I’m a pretty damn good expert on myself. There is nobody better. “So the statistics basically are the icing on the cake and I very much cherry picked it. It’s very much from a personal point of view because the stuff that spoke to me, I quoted. The stuff that didn’t I happily ignored. “Even though I myself feel very comfortable leaning towards the scientist point of view rather than the self help section, neither the show nor the film are strictly scientific. It’s very much a personal project.” AA: During your talk, you mentioned that doing new activities is one of the factors of happiness, and for you, the film and The Happy Show were new activities, as was the research. How much was the show about making yourself happy? SS: “It made me measurably happy because I did measure it.
“While doing the research, I found that whenever a scientist did personal research, I found it so much more interesting than when they talked about a study that they commissioned. Which logically makes no sense because of course the study is going to be better or more exact information than their own single experience, but noticing this in myself, I thought I’d do the same thing and just talk about my experience. “I’ve seen that, in the past, and this is not the first time I’ve realised it, by and large I am mainstream enough if I find something interesting other people do too. So I didn’t have to make a survey on is this interesting or not. If I think this is juicy other people do too.” AA: For The Happy Show, you tried three strategies (meditation, cognitive behavioural therapy and SSRIs or antidepressants) to improve your own happiness, looking at techniques that make a ‘sane’ person happier rather than helping someone with mental health issues such as depression. How were you sure that you are a good example of a ‘sane’ person? Is there even such a thing? SS: “In psychology there are tests to see if you’re sane or not. And so from a purely scientific level yes it can be measured and yes I did do those tests and yes I was sane. “Words like crazy are overused to the point of meaninglessness. For example, Salvador Dali, not one of my favourite artists, apparently said: “The difference between crazy people and me is that I know that I’m crazy.” “But I know of course the craziness in Dali was a branding and marketing gimmick that he used very deliberately because he was a fairly meticulous person otherwise he couldn’t paint those extremely ridiculous and carefully planned out paintings. In that space, craziness has a similar sort of annoying overuse as creative and it’s just that kind of terminology just loses everybody’s interest because it’s used so broadly. AA: Which method did you find was most successful at improving your personal happiness? Which would you recommend to creative people? SS: “I would say that, strangely and unexpectedly for myself, I was probably the most creative on antidepressants. A lot of people have come up to me and told me they’re on antidepressants and I’ve literally heard every possible answer, negative and positive. “Nobody really knows why or how they’re working. We don’t even really know if they do something. There is authoritative research in the UK that shows the entire group of antidepressants has such a little difference from placebo. AA: Many of your paths to happiness involved being in other countries. Do you think true happiness requires a separation from the mundane? SS: “My own experience is that variety in everything works. For example, a total eclipse is really exciting for me. But if I look at it from a design pizazz point of view, a sunrise is much more exciting, and is much better looking than a total eclipse. “The eclipse is ok but the eclipse is special only because of its rarity. If we were to have an eclipse every morning, and a sunrise every couple of years, oh my God people would go nuts for that sunrise. “It’s also the reason why, measurably for me, I’ve been travelling heavily for a very long time now, and it surprises me myself how much I still like it. And of course the main reason I still like it because I very carefully select the destinations and I don’t go to the same places repeatedly and I extremely avoid anything that’s max of a commute and that’s why it works. AA: How long did it take you to create The Happy Show? SS: “We’ve been talking about the subject for about 10 years. We’ve been working on the film for about three and a half and the show itself was sort of an outcome of the film. And the first one was happening two years ago and it’s been travelling ever since. We’ve adapted the show depending on where it goes. It’s going to Paris next.” AA: Is it coming to the UK? SS: “If it could I would love it. I mean right now since it’s going to come over from Chicago to Paris that might make it easier, because of course shipping is a big part of the cost.” AA: Are you pleased with the outcome after all your hard work?
SS: “Yes, on all fronts. We’ve got unbelievable feedback. Among my favourite was a 15-year-old boy from Toronto who, on account of seeing the show, kissed his first girl because he finally got his shit together. “Also, I know that in Chicago I just found out that it’s going to be a new record for the museum as far as attendance is concerned. In Philadelphia they tripled their average time spent in the museum. It’s clearly something people are interested in. “That’s the main reason we do it. If the feedback would have been zero we wouldn’t have done it.” AA: What are you working on now? SS: “Right now I’m very engaged in trying to get The Happy Show filmed up. It’s odd, even though we’re not really exhibition designers and there are many areas of that new to us too, the way a narrative is told in a show is still more similar to a usual graphic design narrative. It’s shorter, leaves the viewer free to make the decision whether they want to take the design in or not, so we are more familiar with it and it is easier. “The film I find is much more difficult because we are dictating the pace, we’re dictating the beginning and the end, and ultimately there’s such a sophisticated medium where we’ve all seen so much good work. I definitely feel out of my depth and find it very difficult.” AA: To announce your partnership with Jessica Walsh, you sent out a postcard of the pair of you posing naked, and for you it was the second naked postcard you had shared with the world. You joked in your talk that you get sick of seeing yourself naked all the time. Looking back on it now, how do you feel about it? SS: “I’m not embarrassed about it, not at all. It’s a piece of design that truly worked. And now I am of course very aware that pieces of design do much more than being functional, but the function part of it, it fulfilled beyond anything that you would normally expect a simple little card to do. “You can look at it from a formal point of view, where it’s not a great piece of design. Or, you could look at it from a stylistic point of view: I’d say there’s two things going on. There’s a mediocre looking guy and a very pretty woman on there. But people saw its point of view afterwards. “I think overall the feedback was overall very, very positive. I for a second was worried because I read a couple of comments that went down the line of, “Oh, they probably fuck each other and she got only the job because she’s good-looking and young.” “I was actually less worried about me because I can handle myself, but I was worried about Jessie. As soon as I checked with Jessie she didn’t give a shit whatsoever.” “She basically said I’m not naive, I knew from the beginning that some people might think that, and she didn’t give a shit. Right now she has a fairly successful project going on about dating and it is very clear that we are not dating. It’s all fine.”
KNSTRCT: An Insightful Interview With Stefan Sagmeister
A. My fathers watch.
A. Tibor Kalman was the single most influential person in my designy life and my one and only design hero. 15 years ago, as a student in NYC, I called him every week for half a year and I got to know the M&Co receptionist really well. When he finally agreed to see me it turned out I had a sketch in my portfolio rather similar in concept and execution then an idea M&Co was just working on: He rushed to show me the prototype out of fear I’d say later he stole it out of my portfolio. I was so flattered. When I finally started working there 5 years later I discovered it was, more than anything else, his incredible salesmanship that set his studio apart from all the others. There were probably a number of people around who were as smart as Tibor (and there were certainly a lot who were better at designing), but nobody else could sell these concepts without any changes, get those ideas with almost no alterations out into the hands of the public. Nobody else was as passionate. As a boss he had no qualms about upsetting his clients or his employees (I remember his reaction to a logo I had worked on for weeks and was very proud of: “Stefan, this is TERRIBLE, just terrible, I am so disappointed”). His big heart was shining through nevertheless. He had the guts to risk everything, I witnessed a very large architecture project where he and M&Co had collaborated with a famous architect and had spent a years worth of work: He was willing to walk away on the question of who will present to the client. Tibor had an uncanny knack for giving advice, for dispersing morsels of wisdom, packaged in rough language later known as Tiborisms: “The most difficult thing when running a design company is not to grow” he told me when I opened my own little studio. “Just don’t go and spend the money they pay you or you are going to be the whore of the ad agencies for the rest of your life” was his parting sentence when I moved to Hong Kong to open up a design studio for Leo Burnett. These insights were also the reason why M&Co. got so much press, journalists could just call him and he would supply the entire structure for a story and some fantastic quotes to boot. He was always happy and ready to jump from one field to another, corporate design, products, city planning, music video, documentary movies, children books, magazine editing were all treated under the mantra “you should do everything twice, the first time you don’t know what you’re doing, the second time you do, the third time its boring”. He did good work containing good ideas for good people.
Q. The Internet… Has it made design better or worse?
Q. Who is your personal hero?
Stefan Sagmeister is a veritable jackknife of skills. A renaissance man in his own right, the famed graphic designer and typographer’s design repertoire spans the gamut of branding, graphics, packaging and album covers. The Grammy-nabbing designer is also the author of “Made You Look“ and “Things I have learned in my life so far,” a teacher at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, and of course he runs his design firm, Sagmeister Inc. with work featured in solo shows in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Japan, Osaka, Prague, Cologne, and Seoul. We’re exhausted just thinking about it, which is why it’s no surprise that Sagmeister is currently taking time off for a little R&R in Bali. Knstrct caught up with him during his year-long sabbatical and he was nice enough to share some personal insight – his design heroes, inspirations, all-time favorite font and donning lederhosen, among other things. Q. What is one essential that you always carry on you?
A: Better. The audience is much more interested in design now because almost everybody is a designer themselves, – involved in type-choices and formatting questions etc. This technology driven change has not led to the predicted job losses for designers but to a desire for more sophisticated work from professionals. Q. The iPad… Do you think print magazines can make a successful transition? A. No. Right now it looks like consumers are not willing to pay for the kind of digital content most magazine’s have to offer in any meaningful numbers. But I am no expert on that at all. . The art of the album cover… What’s next?
A. As mentioned, Tibor Kalman, because he had the most guts of any designer I know and understood that spending energy on making sure that a design appears as designed is as important as designing it. Makoto Saito for selling the same photo shoot to different clients. Rick Valincenti for continuously doing ground breaking work. Paula Scher for designing the best project of her career (the type for the New Jersey Performing Art Center), after a 30 year career, last year. Q. What work are you proudest of?
A. I always thought its going to be the cheaply producable, small file size graphic music video, one that looks great on the small screen and can be made by a very small team. I was wrong.
A. Likely the whole “Things I have learned” series. The individual projects were a pleasure to design and create, lecturing and exhibiting them was a pleasure, I was pleased with how the book came out and even now, 10 years after we started the series, I have a good time talking about it. We also got a lot of positive and steady feedback about it.
Q. Did you ever wear a lederhosen as a child growing up in Austria?
Q. Have you seen any of the Twilight saga (be honest here)?
A. Yes. I even wore leatherhosen to work on my first day at a corporate job in New York. It caused a minor sensation (not in a good way).
A. No. And I am not quite sure why this question requires particular honesty.
Q. How many tubes of Neosporin did you go through after having the details of a talk xacto-ed onto your torso by your intern?
Q. Where did you put your three Grammy awards? A. Two are on an a book shelf, the third destroyed when my dog sat on it.
A. One.
Q. What is your guilty pleasure?
Q. What is your favorite part of a sandwich?
A. Including at least one lie when answering interviews.
A. The cheese.
Q. What advice would you give up-and-coming graphic designers?
Q. Did you ever dream of being anything besides a graphic designer?
A. Dont take any advice from tried-and-true graphic designers.
A. A mountain bike.
Q. What is your all-time favorite font?
Q. Who influences your work?
A. My own hand writing. Q. Can you successfully play an ‘Alphorn?’ A. No. But my first design job, when I was 15, was at a magazine called Alphorn. Q. Ever caught any unsavory shenanigans on the live cam in your office? A. Only rehearsed ones. Q. What does wasted time look like to you? A. Like a lemon wafer.
Origin Magazine: Stefan Sagmeister an interview by Zoe Kors Zoe Kors: What inspires you most? Stefan Sagmeister: Being in a foreign place, preferably for the first time, having seen many things and collected new impressions, and returning to an empty hotel room with an hour or so to blow. That mix often yields fine results. ZK: What makes you feel vulnerable? SS: Entering a room full of people I dont know. ZK: How do you process emotional pain? SS: Working it off. ZK: Tell me about your sabbaticals and the power of time off, in terms of the creative process and life in general. SS: The original impulse for the first sabbatical had many fathers. Among them was the event of Ed Fella visiting the studio and bringing a number of his fantastic-type experiments executed into a sketchbook with a four-color ballpoint pen. When he self-mockingly called it “exit art,” I felt what a pity it is that one does this sort of stuff only with sixty—it would have had a much bigger impact on a working life when it would be interspersed regularly throughout ones life. Tibor Kalman’s early death played a role, as any death reminds us that our time here is finite, that we better use it a good as we can. I did the first year when I was thirty-eight, the second with forty-six. I have only two more such years to go before the retirement age of sixty-five. I think it’s much more useful to take those years early, divided up throughout my working life rather than pinning them to the end of it. Ferran Adria, who is considered by many as the best chef in the world, closed his restaurant north of Barcelona for six months every year while keeping a full kitchen staff in order to experiment. That’s 50% of his time for experimentation, compared with my paltry 12.5%. As mentioned, I myself am doing a full year of experiments every seven years, but I’m sure many other divisions are possible, depending on the field, the possibilities, and personal preferences. One hour a day or a day a week. And: Everything that we designed and I still like in the seven years following the first sabbatical had its roots in thinking done during that sabbatical. ZK: One of the things I love most of all about your work is the way you have been able to blur the lines between art, commerce, and consciousness. There is no better example of this than Things I’ve Learn in My LIfe So Far, in which you take statements of personal truth, create stunning environmental works of art, and have your corporate clients fund it all. Brilliant! What was your original vision for this project? What makes it so powerful? How did you get your clients to buy in? SS: I actually had no original vision for this series. We started this when a couple of clients gave us an unusual amount of freedom. Only when the feedback from the audiences of these clients was excellent did it occur to me that there might be a whole series in this direction. ZK: Many of the statements from Things I’ve Learned are simple. Some are more provocative. Can you elaborate on, “Trying to look good limits my life”? SS: It is meant as, trying to always be the nice guy, to appear good, can be limiting. Avoiding confrontation has closed up a number of possibilities for me. ZK: Another is, “Having guts always works out for me.” When has having guts best served you? SS: Basically always. Whenever I do overcome my inherent fear, it turns out well. Knowing this now for over
twenty years, it is surprising that I still need to talk myself into it. It does seem to get a tiny little bit easier though. ZK: You’ve also said, “Keeping a diary supports my personal development.” Do you consistently keep a diary? I’d love to be locked in a room with your diary. What does it look like? Email me a snapshot. SS: “Keeping a diary supports personal development” came from the realization that my diary entries allow me to keep track of all the things I would like to change about my life. I used to keep a handwritten diary, but changed many, many years ago into a digital one, mostly because I found it easier to reread, as my handwriting had deteriorated to illegibility when I was very excited (and these were always the most interesting bits). ZK: What projects do you have coming up that you are excited about? SS: Top and foremost, to work on and finish the Happy Film, to see if we actually made something that is worthwhile. ZK: Tell me a little bit about the film. SS: When I did research for this film and read many, many psychology books on happiness, I found that whenever a scientist talked about something that had actually happened to her, a personal experience, I took this much more seriously than when she wrote about a survey she conducted. So I changed the direction of the film from a general documentation on the subject to focus mainly on personal experiences, hoping that viewers would have the same reaction as I had. The film in itself will not make viewers happy (in the same way as watching Jane Fonda exercise wont make you lose weight), but I do hope that it might be the little kick in the ass to some viewers to explore these directions, like meditation or cognitive therapy. We plan to release it early 2014. ZK: Love that Stefan, like teaching someone to fish. Thanks so much! SS: Thank you, Zoe!
Smashing Magazine: Stefan Sagmeister Interview Q: Do we have to gather in the economical centres of the world in order to do better graphic design? Design by its own definition, not only communication design but also product design—from a broader point of view, they’re about the interaction of humans. Now, you have more interactions of humans in cities. Bigger concentration, much higher density than you’d have in the countryside. Consequently, as a designer, I’m invited a lot to different places around the world, and they’re almost without exception cities. So, there is now just much higher usage of design and products, but also in the making of them, and in the thinking about them. At the same time though, technology allows us to do fantastic work anywhere. And this is true for young designers. I’ve seen colleges outside of cities. They do amazing work that uses the remoteness, as part of their limitations [as designers], and turn it to their advantage. I’ve also seen design companies, being in provincial areas, who do brilliant work. Q: So, in the years to come, will designers be more able to live anywhere and do work anywhere? In a sense, I would say, because you can technically do it. But, obviously, the density of information and the experiences will be probably more for the cities than the countryside. So, I could see this working beautifully for a limited period of time, and I’m actually going to move for a year to the countryside to do exactly that— try a different style of working. I will be in Indonesia, quite far away from any urban centre. I’d have to fly to Jakarta or Singapore. That’ll be for a year, but I don’t think that I’d want to do this for the rest of my life. Q: Which was there the point in your career that you managed to start working on your own terms? Was it difficult in the beginning? From a single point of view, even as a student, I looked for jobs that allowed work that I thought was good. And for sure, when we started the studio, right from the start, we tried to do work that we could be satisfied with. That’s what I felt it was best doing. I don’t think that you can open a studio and do mediocre work to make money and somehow switch over to good stuff. I haven’t seen it happen. Because everything that they [your clients] do, reflects on everything that you do. If you do a lot of mediocre work, it’s going to attract a lot of mediocre clients. Q: Where there sacrifices you had to do to allow yourself this freedom? There were not many sacrifices involved. What I did, was that I designed a situation for myself, where the studio would need very little money. Our overheads were very, very small, so we didn’t get into this “difficulty” of having to have a lot of income coming in and then having to take on jobs that we wouldn’t be happy with. Q: Are you bothered about the distinctions between the arts and design? As a consumer or viewer of art and design I don’t care. As a consumer my question is if it’s good or not, not if it’s art or design. As a do-er [creator/maker of it], somehow I have to care. I’ve been asked here and there about it… and on a daily basis there is a distinction as far as the media, distribution methods and functionality of the pieces is concerned. I think that design pieces at large need to be functional, while art pieces at large don’t have to be functional, just be—they don’t have to actually do anything. Q: In this way you differentiate your work from a fine artist’s work? Yes, exactly. Q: Back to graphics, you’re a letterer and you enjoy the craftsmanship. Is it equally important for you, the form of the letterforms and the medium (that dictates the outcome)? Both yes. Actually, even when we produce something that is made out of something, the form is not totally driven by that one medium. I’ll give an example. When we did the world limits swimming around in the swimming pool, we sketched that out before, because I didn’t want this air conditioning, tubing material, that we made it out from, solely to dictate the form of that work.
Q: Is craftsmanship a way to be unique in the digital era? Well, I think it was maybe 10 years ago. Specifically, when modernism first came back, and everything was suddenly cold and machine-like, it made a lot of sense to introduce handwriting, but also to introduce a higher level of craft. Right now, craft in almost all artistic directions is a very hot topic. Start with product design, but in art, crafts coming back big time, you see the German painters, who can actually paint, having an unbelievable career. We went through such a long term, maybe two or three decades, where craft didn’t play a role at all, and I mean consciously it didn’t. People who could paint, consciously did not paint. In general, craft is just a function of knowing your tools really well. Knowing your tools very well, on the one hand can be an advantage. On the other hard, I’ve also seen people hooked back into their tools that they know so well, and they stay in their small little section [world] and can’t really get out to see the bigger picture. Personally, I’m most comfortable to go in and out. Q: Art colleges in Europe don’t seem to teach much crafts any more, do they? In design education, they are much more about what the world does right now. Interestingly, in most graduate schools, being technically good at something is almost a bad word if you’re talking about contemporary craft. Somebody who is very good in photoshop, is almost universally despised at a grad school. It’s silly. I’m not saying that I’m a friend of people who can do just that and can’t think, but I think a combination of skills matters. Q: Where do you think design education is going? I could only give you a superficial answer to it, simply because colleges are a very vast system. There are colleges and universities that do a fantastic job. I just came back from the Royal College of Art in London. I saw the work of six design students. And five of them were fantastic, work of a very high level. I also see people in Holland doing work that I can assure you, is far more advanced that anything I was thinking of when I was 23. Much more sophisticated. Their education is so much better, they know much more, they have much more experience than I had at that age. I’m not quite sure why this is. Is it because I have the chance to see these people now? Or because I just never met them when I was 23? But then I see the opposite, people who are being taught by bad professors, and they’re not that successful. So there is a very wide spectrum out there, and if I would be a student now, I would have to do some serious research. Which is relatively easy to do— just look at the work of graduate students, you can tell immediately. Q: So, do you think that it depends massively on the school and their practice or philosophy, or the country of study? Oh no, of course there are a couple of star schools across the world, and there are some countries that really figured out how to school design education—Germany being one of them. If I would have to pick one, anywhere in [the world] where I can see the most, I’d think of Germany. Considering that these four, five schools, don’t refer to themselves as being the best… I think education here (Germany) is fantastic! If I would live in a country, like the US, where art education is unbelievably expensive, I’d probably go through the trouble to learn the German language and get my education there. I know that there are protests here because they are now paying €500 a semester here. And you pay $18,000 a semester in the in the US. And education is really good. I talked to teachers that are very good designers, and the government pays them salaries that they can give up a part of their profession, and it’s actually doable. In the US if you teach you can do it as a hobby. I do teach 3 hours a week, but I can’t be available to my students during the week. I just talked to [a designer who] I think is the best poster designer alive. He’s teaching in Stuttgart, and he has all he needs, [which] allows him to leave a part of his practice and take teaching seriously. And he does that. And you see the outcome, because he’s available to his students. On the contrary, in the US and many other countries you have to do either teaching or design. Although there are great designers also doing full time teaching, you have mediocre [medium level] designers who become full time faculty staff.