Saul Bass

Graphic Design Superstar

Stefan Sagmeister 

Stefan Sagmeister is an Austrian-born US based contemporary graphic designer, typographer, performance artist, writer and film maker whose current studio is in New York.  He also teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Arts in New York and has been appointed as the Frank Slanton Chair at the Cooper Union School of Art,
New York.

Stefan, the youngest of six children, like many in their youth, liked music and the images on the album covers.  He also had a passion for designing and began his designing career at age 15.   After graduating high school, he enrolled in an engineering college, opting later to enroll in graphic designing courses.  He applied to the University of Applied Arts Vienna (being accepted after his second try), where he received his MFA and in 1987 earned the Fullbright Scholarship for New York based Pratt Institute.  He also has a Masters in Communication.

After working for a few different companies, he founded “Sagmeister Inc.” in 1993, as all he “wanted to do was to run a small design studio, that does the kind of work he wanted to do”. 

Once he had his own company, he decided to pursue work that combined his love for both graphics and music and began working on music graphics starting with the “Zinker’s Mountains of Madness” album.  For this he created optical illusion graphics that appealed to the music audience (buying customers) and as a result earned him four Grammy nominations.  Following this recognition, other artists (some of his musical heroes) requested him to design cover artwork, including Lou Reed for “Set the Twighlight Reeling”, David Byrne and Brian Eno’s “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today”, the Rolling Stones “Bridges of Babylon”, OK Go’s debut studio album and Talking Heads “One in Lifetime” box set and the controversial cover for Aerosmith’s “Nine Lives”.  Since that time, Stefan has been awarded three Grammy’s and the National Design Award as well as the AIGA Medal for his graphic designs.

 

In 2010, Jessica Walsh had contacted him asking for his artistic advice and feedback on her portfolio and career, after her ex-boyfriend gave her a copy of Stefan’s monograph “Made you look”.  After briefly looking at Jessica’s book, he offered her a job “When do you want to come work for me?” With that, she quit her other job the following day. And in 2012 he decided to offer her a partner position in the firm, thus making the firm now “Sagmeister & Walsh.”

Jessica Walsh & Stefan Sagmeister

Over the years Sagmeister and his team have designed artwork for HBO, Time Warner, Levi’s, the Guggenheim Museum

Stefan is a big “List Maker”.  And over the years he has used some of his “list items” (or text fragments) and turned them into projects for both individual concepts and concepts for clients work for magazines, videos and commercials.  One such “List Item” was:

“Obsessions make my life worse and my work better”

September 2008 – Coin Mural-Installation Art – Waagdragerhof Square in Amsterdam

On September 13^th, 2008, Stefan along with his design team (Richard The & Joe Shouldice) began the installation of “Obsessions”.  Over the course of eight days (and the help of more than 100 volunteers), the installation of 250,000 Eurocents, “Obsessions” on Waagfragerhof Square was completed.  The coins were sorted into four different shades, laid out, per the master plan, and carefully placed over the 300 sqm area.

The concept was that the coins would be left out unguarded for the public to interact with.  However, less than 20 hours after the grand opening of this “Coin Mural”, a local resident, who had been watching and admiring the mural as it was being created, noticed a person not only “interacting with the coins” but bagging them up and taking them.  The resident called the police, who stopped the criminal.  Then the police “in an effort to ‘preserve the artwork’”, so they (the police) swept up the remaining coins and carted them away.

Over the years, Sagmeister has done many TED talks including “Things I’ve learned in my life so far”, “Happiness and Design” and “The power of time off”.  In the latter, he explains the “often overlooked value of time off” explaining to the TED audience that in one’s lifetime, one spends the first 25 years learning, the next 40 years working and then about 15 years of retirement.  But from a professional standpoint feels it would be helpful to everyone to disperse those “retirement years” in amongst the “working years” for a better enriched life.

So…Every seven years, he closes the studio closes for a yearlong sabbatical.  This time off gives him, Jessica and their staff, time to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook.  With usually innovative projects and overwhelming success with the clients he and his team serves.

Sagmeister’s thoughts, advice, concepts, ideas and designs are intriguing and innovative, making the viewer question and respect what a graphic designer/artist role in society is and how it plays into today’s society.

I too believe, like Sagmeister that many people today are motivated by their salaries rather than job satisfaction.  And his saying of “If you love your job, you don’t need a hobby” can be very much understood how much he loves his job, as his current work morphs graphic designer to a conceptional typographer to performance artist.

Information compiled from articles and webpages: sagmeisterwalsh.com, TED.com, en.Wikipedia.org, famousgraphicdesigners.org, aiga.org, graphis.com, designindaba.com