1:Stefan Sagmeister

Stefan Sagmeister
Graphic designer and Typographer

"Design that needed guts from the creator and still carries the ghost of these guts in the final execution."

• Born 1962 in Bregenz, Austria
• Owned a turtle when very young


• Began his design career at the age of 15 at "Alphorn", a left wing Austrian Youth magazine
• After being rejected initially, he studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna
• Designed posters for the Schauspielhaus theatre group as part of the Gruppe Gut collective
• Received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York in 1987
• Returned to Austria in 1990 for compulsory military service, serving as a conscientious objector, doing community work
• In 1991, he moved to Hong Kong to work with the advertising agency Leo Burnett

• 1993, he returned to New York to work Tibor Kalman's M&Co design firm
• He set up his own company Sagmeister Inc. in 1993
• 1994 he was nominated for a grammy award for his album cover - 'h. p. zinker mountains of madness’
• Work has included designed branding, graphics, and packaging for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, OK Go, Lou Reed, Aerosmith, HBO, the Guggenheim Museum and Time Warner



• Sagmeister Inc. remains a small company so as to retain the freedom to choose jobs
• In 2001 released the book ‘Sagmeister (made you look) (another self-indulgent design monograph)’
• in 2005 he won a grammy award as art director of the ‘once in a lifetime’ talking heads boxed set packaging
• Currently working on typographic work ‘20 things in my life I have learned so far.’

“and 'style = fart'?
 yes I said this but I had to give up. It was the headline of 
a theory that style and stylistic questions are just hot air
and meaningless. I discovered that this is simply not true.
Through experience I found that if you have content that is
worthwhile, the proper expression of that content, in terms of
form and style is actually very important. It can be a very
useful tool to communicate that content.
I don't think that it is actually hot-air anymore.”

http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/sagmeister.html
18.2.2010

http://www.sagmeister.com/index.html
http://designmuseum.org/design/stefan-sagmeister
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Sagmeister
http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/sagmeister.html
http://www.designobserver.com/observermedia/audiofile.html?entry=11857
http://www.typotheque.com/articles/how_good_is_good
http://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_shares_happy_design.html