Responsible for album covers such as The Stones' Bridges To Babylon, he's the pop star of graphic designers. Scott Kara talks to Stefan Sagmeister, the modest man behind the art
KEY POINTS:
Stefan Sagmeister is like the Keith Richards of billboard concepts. Or the Sid Vicious of poster and business card designs.
But the humble Sagmeister, on the phone from the New York office of Sagmeister Inc, the graphic design company he set up in 1993, laughs off the suggestion, even though he's done projects that Motley Crue and the dead-and-buried former Sex Pistol would be proud of.
There's the time he slashed large amounts of text into his skin for a poster advertising a lecture he was giving at the American Institute Of Graphic Arts. How Vicious is that? Or in his early design days when a girlfriend asked him to design business cards which didn't cost more than a $1 each, so he printed them on dollar bills.
Although he insists he's no rock star.
"Being a famous designer is like being a famous electrician," he says, borrowing a quote from his designer mate Chip Kidd. "If you're at an electrician's conference, everybody knows you and as soon as you step out of there, nobody has the slightest idea who you are," he laughs.
These days, with his diverse and unique designs for everything from packaging to billboards to installations, Sagmeister is one of the most important graphic designers in the world and his clients include the Rolling Stones and Lou Reed, television network HBO, and New York's Guggenheim Museum. His works range from billboards for Super Bock beer in Portugal, to catalogues for fashion designer Anni Kuan, to a portable box with a slanted mirror on top, which holds postcards by artist Douglas Gordon as part of his exhibition The Vanity Of Allegory, which was on at the Guggenheim.
Sagmeister is in Auckland this week for the annual design event Semi-Permanent08 which brings together some of the world's most influential designers, photographers, illustrators and other creative types (see sidebar).
For most of us, graphic design is about the cereal packaging we rip into each morning or the billboards we see on the way to work.
So what place and power does Sagmeister think designers have in the world today?
"I think a lot of the things graphic designers do ... can be unbelievably powerful and extremely effective but completely invisible. We only realise and see this power when it fails catastrophically."
He says one of the most famous examples of this was the flaws in the Florida polling form during the 2000 presidential election when George Bush became president.
"Clearly a graphic design failure," he says. "If the form would have been designed correctly [Al] Gore would be president and nobody would ever had related that to the power of graphic design. It would have just been down to [the form] functioning properly."
He admits in his early days his designs were all about executing an idea clearly and making it function the way it should. As he developed his style it became "not so ideas-heavy" and was able to incorporate emotional and objective elements, which he says are essential to communicating an idea.
He likens it to music. "Most ideas-based music is crappy. Music that is purely ideas-based is jokey music, like Weird Al Yankovic, or a concept album that only works here and there, on rare occasions. But over time I've learned that there is room in design for an approach where you take the execution, form and style of a piece very seriously."
The 46-year-old was born in Austria in the town of Bregenz, an area divided from the rest of the country by a mountain range. He attributes his strong work ethic to the fact the town was close to Germany and Switzerland, so he picked up on the mentality of being "versatile, solid and organised".
As a youngster, Sagmeister was fascinated by album artwork and covers like King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King from 1969. "It had an incredible shouting, close-cropped man's face on it," he remembers.
He was also influenced by the cover art of Pink Floyd albums done by London design company Hipgnosis and designer Storm Thorgerson, including the cow cover of Atom Heart Mother (1970) and, most famously, Dark Side of the Moon (1973).
It's these albums that inspired his love of design and when he opened his studio he wanted to combine his two loves.
Even though he knows the fate of the album cover "is dead, pretty much", he made a name for himself doing CD artwork during the 90s. He did some covers for little known friends' bands and one of these, Mountains of Madness by HP Zinker, was nominated for a Grammy in 1996.
This led to work for former Talking Head David Byrne (he depicted Byrne as a GI-Joe doll on the cover of his 1997 album Feelings), the Rolling Stones (on 1997's Bridges To Babylon), and Reed (for 1996's Set The Twilight Reeling).
Reed is still one of his clients, and musical heroes and no, the renowned rock 'n' roll grump isn't cantankerous.
"Not at all," laughs Sagmeister. "Lou is really only interested in the music and can't really stand anything else surrounding it. I've read interviews where he comes across as the most grumpy, obnoxious person but I have never seen him like that," he chuckles again.
For Sagmeister's cover of Reed's album, the CD case was a dark purple/blue hue, making the cover look simply like a dark blue picture of Reed's face; the bright yellow aspect and the "rays" of the cover image were only made apparent when the liner notes were removed from the case.
For Sagmeister, graphic design is a lifestyle and he's even written books about it. The first, Made You Look, is strictly for hardcore designers as it is a collection of almost all of Sagmeister's work, and the second, and more interesting for the design-deficient among us, Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far.
The latter is a strange but intriguing book. It's unbound for starters and comes in the form of 15 booklets in a box. It's more like a philosophy, or life lesson, than a design book.
In it he offers up statements - some of which he admits are banal - like "Worrying solves nothing" and "Starting a charity is surprisingly easy", and each of these is represented by a design project and personal anecdotes. And if there's one chapter worth programming into your life it's this one: "Complaining Is Silly. Either Act Or Forget."
This slogan was for the Portuguese billboard campaign for Super Bock beer. So cheers to that.
LOWDOWN
What: Semi-Permanent08, design forum bringing together some of the best creative talent from New Zealand and around the world.
When: Aotea Centre, Auckland, August 15 & 16.
Who: Stefan Sagmeister (US), graphic designer (see main story); Danny Yount (US), film and TV title director and designer who did opening sequence for Six Feet Under; Marian Bantjes (Canada), artists and illustrator known for her "lovingly precise vector art, and obsessive handwork"; Derek Henderson (NZ), photographer who has shot for magazines like Vogue, Pyster, Harpers Bazaar, and clients include Levis, Lee Jeans, Karen Walker and Coca Cola; Karsten Schmidt aka Toxi (Britain), softerware developer and designer; Collider (Australia), design, film and production collective whose portfolio includes Nike, Air France, BMW, Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, and music videos; Kate Bezar (Australia), Aussie-based Kiwi, founder and publisher of Dumbo Feather, an award winning "mook" (that's book crossed with magazine); The Wilderness (NZ), made up of Kelvin Soh and Simon Oosterdijk whose portfolio includes album art for Goodshirt, Che Fu and Dimmer, Tiger Beer, and 42 Below.
Tickets: $190 (waged) $110 (students), includes entry to event, exhibitions, wrap party and goodie bag which has the Semi-Permanent book inside.
