Designer : Stephan Sagmeister

Stefan Sagmeister (born 1962 in Bregenz, Austria) is a graphic designer and typographer currently based in New York City. He has his own design firm, Sagmeister Inc. He has designed album covers for Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Aerosmith and Pat Metheny.
Sagmeister studied graphic design at University of Applied Arts Vienna, later receiving the Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York.

In 1991, he moved to Hong Kong to work the Leo Burnett's Hong Kong Design Group.
In 1993, he returned to New York to work Tibor Kalman's M&Co design firm. His tenure there was short lived, as Kalman soon decided to retire from the design business to edit Colors magazine for the Benetton Group in Rome.
After the closure of M&Co, Sagmeister formed his own firm, Sagmeister Inc., which operates to this day. Sagmeister Inc. has employed designers including Martin Woodtli; and Hjalti Karlson and Jan Wilker, who later formed Karlssonwilker.

-Interview-

Q: Most of your often-published work is taken from your book “Made you look”. Are you planning to publish a new book containing more recent work?

A: Yes, we are actually but we are not in a hurry. In fact, there are two books that are in progress: one that is somewhat similar to Made you look, in terms of featuring our newest work and there is another book that is going to be quite different. That other one will exclusively feature a series of work that we have been working on for the last four years and that we will continue working on.

Q: Are you talking about the “Things I learned in my life so far”- series?

A: Exactly! That is going to be a seperate book.

Q: Oh great, I can’t wait! This is actually one of my favorite Sagmeister ones, if not the most favorite!

A: The paper that you saw lying on the floor will be turned into a poster as part of that series. We will ship that out to Lisbon either tonight or tomorrow, where it’s going to be put together as a huge billboard. It is newsprint sheets with stencils on them, which we had lying on our rooftop for a week. Since it was exposed to the New York sun everything turns yellow, but the stencils stay white. Put together this billboard is going to read: Complaining is silly. Either act or forget. When we put it up in Lisbon, it’s going to be exposed with Lisbon sun, so eventually everything is going to fade away. So literally the sun will equal the difference, will make the complaining go away.

Q: In what way relate the built words to the material they are made of in the “Things I learned…”- series? How strict are you to yourself in terms of finding the right concept to “build” the word as opposed to just making them look nice?

A: We are using a different strategy for every single sentence in this series. Some things I have learned are very close in outward form and content, while others are further apart. For example, the form of “Everything I do always comes back to me” relates directly to its content, while “Money does not make me happy” does not.
Even though I am not a big fan of ambiguity in visual expression, (and HATE that stupid line: Oh, the viewer can take away whatever he or she wants), because of the fact that these thing are personal learning experiences from my own life, I felt it important to leave the form more open for interpretation to make it easier for people to relate. - - And yes, if they wind up looking nice, that’s nice too.

Q: Is there any particular meaning for this series to be set up in Lisbon or…

A: No, it’s just because they asked and I always do what I’m asked. They found a sponsor for it, so we accepted. The work will be shown as part of the Bienal de Lisbon, the Experimenta.

Q: There is quite a difference between the pre-Made you look and the post-Made you look. What are your most liked projects after the Made you look book?

A: There was a year without clients after we made the book and I got to think and sort out many things within that time. Before that our work very much focused on the music industry but we kind of stopped that now.

Now we concentrate on 4 things basically- we still do some stuff for the music industry, we do some stuff for art as far as galleries and museums go (books and posters and that stuff), we also do some work for regular corporations and some social work. You could roughly say, that everything is about a quarter. I guess I have favorites in each of these categories.

For music: the work we did for Talking Heads.

As for corporate work: maybe an annual report we did for the Austrian lighting company Zumtobel.

For social stuff: probably the stuff we did for True Majority and One Voice.

For art: when it eventually comes out the Monument to Now book for the contemporary art exhibition which took place alongside the Olympics in Athens. We already finished designing a soft cover book, which turned out fine and nice, but we also still working on a very delicious hard cover book, that is unbelievably complicated to make and therefore the production is so utterly vague…. If this ever comes out, that would probably by my favorite art project.

Q: I wonder, who pays for such a project?

A: Our Greece client Dakis Joannou has a gigantic art collection and that show is put together entirely out of his own collection. He is not as known as Charles Saatchi, but still, his collection is certainly one of the most significant ones of contemporary art in the world, much stronger than those of many museums. There are already several books on his collection and he asked us to do this special one for him. Since he doesn’t need to make money out of this project, we are able to try such a difficult production process. Usually a book like this simply wouldn’t be possible.

Q: Your work uses a lot of handmade typography. Is one of the reasons for that, that you find it easier to implement your idea of making the process of a project visible within the work with handmade typography?

A: It actually started with a page within a CD booklet for Lou Reed. This page was very well received, so we turned it into a poster, which then was extremely well received, mostly because that was ‘96 and everyone elwe was doing modernism, very slick and high polished work. Our work stood out, because it was something obviously handmade, human touched and haptic, going away from this cold world. At this time, I was also unhappy with changing styles all the time. Before, I had this period where I thought you can never re-use anything and always do a new style for everything. That basically proved impossible, besides you are in danger of just ripping different other styles off. Therefor, I was happy to explore that handmade typography idea a bit further. I absolutely don’t think that this is the solution to every project. I think each project calls for different strategies, not just content-wise but also form wise.

Q: A lot of your famous projects are handmade, though. The “Things I learned in my life so far”- series is also handmade typography.

A: But not exclusively! That would not be part of the strategy. A good number of them are made with built type- so you can see that they are human made but we did one exclusively on the computer with Ken Miki, or we did a mixed one where it is partly built type…. it varies.

Q: How much are other designers and your team involved in the design process? What is their main part?

A: Again, it varies wildly. For the one we are just working on “Over time I get used to everything and start taking it for granted” I gave an overall direction, then all three of us worked on concepts for single words. All three were involved with the shoot (Richard managing the camera) and Richard is also going to do the editing. Some others I did by myself and then there is the one I just sent off to Ken Miki, one of my favorite designers in Japan.

Q: Looking at work like your poster for Adobe, or the Japanese poster with the sofa, one immediately starts imagining your process of making your designs and is therefor much more emotionally involved, than if it was a computer generated clean style. Could you say, that you use this storytelling and handmade typography as a trick to get people involved in your designs?

A: Yes, this can be a way. I think that so many regular people, which are removed from the daily practice of graphic design - so maybe 99.9% - have actually no clue when they see a piece of well done graphic design, that there was actually a human behind it. Many look at a newspaper and think, that a machine did it all - and to a large extend, of couse a computer was involved, but they don’t quite get the fact that there are still many human decisions to be made when designing a newspaper: what typefaces are used, how wide the margins are… they just don’t think about it and why should they.

A: In my work, I can sometimes expose the process of making a design as a strategy to humanize the whole project. If the project allows it, I am happy to show the whole making of it, creating a little narrative whithin the piece. This is the ideal for me, just like it was done on the Pink Floyd “Animals” cover. (A huge inflatable pig was set up to fly over Battersea Power Station to be photographed, but then broke loose and flew all the way to Wales. It created a lot of press and admiration among fans.)

Q: You mentioned several times, that design should make somebodies life easier, rather than more difficult. I can understand it as a general approach towards design, especially for people doing information design, but didn’t you design a lot of music covers…?

A: Well I’d say as far as our work is concerned- I’d be happy if it does no harm. I don’t think that a music cover makes anybodies life easier. There is a possibility that a music cover- and I cannot talk about ours here, because I cannot see them in that way- but that music covers by other designers that I have seen brought a little joy to my life. However, I think that there are other pieces that we have designed which at least aim to make somebodies life easier.

Q: For example?

A: True Majority, the group that we are working for, was I think the first mainstream group that really pushed for having the situation in Sudan declared as genocide. That made - as far as I can tell - a huge difference for Sudan, because when the States agreed for this to be declared as a genocide, things moved there fairly quickly. It is in trouble again now, but I think for a while it really made a difference. Our design for True Majority really didn’t do that, but it helped a little bit, tiny little increments… but tiny little increments are tiny little increments. (smile) Every single person can somehow contribute and it doesn’t really matter, what you do.

Q: You always mention, that content is so important for you. How interested are you in getting involved in the content yourself?

A: Well- we already tried to be the charity ourselves- very un- successful! I found that if you want to act as a charity that is effective, you have to do that as a full time job.I would have to give up design and I think that I would be less effective on the whole.

Q: Much of the work that we did for True Majority wasn’t artsy at all. It was very much done with effectiveness in mind and not whether the design world would like it or not.

A: Is it enough to touch somebodies heart?

Q: For me- yes! It is so difficult already. What would you suggest to do beyond that?

A: I know (smiles)- that is probably the most difficult thing, but maybe - again - getting involved more in the actual content like you already do in terms of the “Things I learned”- series. Maybe that is why they are so powerful…

Q: I think there is some sort of desire like that, too, but I am still happy to be a graphic designer and fulfill this profession and what that profession implies. This is, what I feel I am best at.

A: You once said: work slower, do less work, do it better. This however implies a whole life-style, meaning that you can surly be picky with your work but have to accept to earn less money. How much freedom can you actually allow yourselves?

Q: Pretty much! The answer to that is simply to keep the studio small. You have seen how small we keep it here! It would be so “natural” to grow bigger, but I know - even at a 10 people studio - you can already feel this machinery behind it and are in big danger to just find stuff to feed your machine constantly to keep things going, rather than enjoying design and trying to do good work.

Q: How do you convince clients that your work is good? Can you prevent your original designs from client changes? Is it still hard for you to fight things through or are you famous enough, that your design ideas are simply accepted?

A: I was actually hopeing, that once your studio is running and you are established as a designer, things would get easier but I still find myself fighting with clients and having a hard time convincing them… seems like this will never change.

Q: New software is everywhere and more and more things can be achieved with the computer… Do you think that your designs would be different, if you had (for example) very high 3D modulating skills? Is this a criteria for hiring additional staff for that or do you simply stay away from newest technology?

A: Well yes, very likely my work would be different if I had high end 3-D computer modeling skills. But since I don’t have these skills, I don’t have to be involved in building wire grids and can spend my time thinking what we should do and for whom we should do it.
And yes, of course I try to hire people who love doing things that I am bad at. The last thing I need is a little Stefan in the studio…

Q: I know that you are a fan of free design projects such as street artist True. Were you ever thinking of going a bit more into the guerilla-good deeds designer yourself?

Actually, no! Some of my students have made beautiful works like that, or there are things I sometimes see in the streets like Ji Lee’s speech bubbles, he is this kind of designer/artist, who pastes big speach bubble stickers on posters and then people go and write stuff in them. He then comes back and photographs the results. I really love this kind of work, but just didn’t have a good idea yet myself. I have seen fantastic projects but never had the concept of doing something good myself. If I had, I would.

Thank you very much, Stefan! It was a pleasure visiting you.