Stefan Sagmeister
19th Brno Biennale 2000 Grand Prix Winner

Design Centre of Czech Republic, Radnická 2
15 June – 19 September 2004
Curators: Dagmar Koudelková a Marta Sylvestrová

At the “book” Biennale in 2000, the International Jury awarded the Grand Prix to Stefan Sagmeister for the design of David Byrne’s book and musical album Your Action World. Rick Poynor, President of the Jury, said in his comments on the decision that the jury had given full recognition to Sagmeister’s style, which expresses a new understanding of design.
The exhibition at the Design Centre of the Czech Republic presents Stefan Sagmeister as one of the most influential and most interesting personalities in modern design. International renown has come to him very quickly. He took part in the Brno Biennale for the first time – and won. At the same time, his “body art” poster became famous at similar poster exhibitions. It promoted his own lecture at the AIGA Detroit and Cranbrook Academy of Art (Thursday, 25 February 1999), displaying typography scratched on his own body. In an effort to create “a simple form of design that would touch the viewer”, he had suffered eight hours of physical torture, intentionally denying the ease of digital simulations. The poster became a graphic icon of the 1990’s.
Sagmeister’s new understanding of design puts personal involvement before the perfection of computer solutions, and appeals to the public through this personal investment. Stefan Sagmeister’s work stems from a simple original idea that can enhance the work. Optical tricks, sexuality, association of banalities with humour, irony and secrecy: these are what lie behind his concepts.
He comes from the Austrian town of Bregenz at the foot of the Alps, where his family worked in the fashion business. His uncle Otto Sagmeister hoodwinked the public, in the interests of business, with company pictures featuring a fictitious international liquor-producing factory with a branch in France, where he had never been at all. Stefan first considered a career in music, and during his secondary school studies in Dornbirn he did graphic layout for the leftist magazine Alphorn.
When Sagmeister was nineteen, he left for Vienna to study graphic art at the Academy of Decorative Art. His first attempt to enrol was unsuccessful, so he attended a private school to prepare him for his second, successful, try. However, study at the Academy disappointed him and had no influence on his visual style. Through Alexander Goebel, a rock musician and his sister’s boyfriend, he became acquainted with the Schauspielhaus theatre group. During his studies in Vienna he designed posters for them as a member of Gruppe Gut, a creative group of four, in the style of the 1970’s anarchist graphic art and punk musical albums. He and his friends occasionally amused themselves by producing official-looking humorous decrees that they pasted in the streets of the city centre. His campaign for the preservation of the Ronacher musical theatre in 1984 was very successful. He completed his studies with a set of interactive postcards, in which he used a series of inventive ideas, among them optical tricks inspired by M. C. Escher, which he later developed in his profession as a designer. The project was formally recognised by the City of Vienna cultural commission.
When Sagmeister qualified for a Fulbright scholarship in 1987, it allowed him to study at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and gave him a period of creative independence. He was free to do occasional projects of his own choice, for example the development of concept visiting cards for Little Gold, Tony Goldman’s firm, or the welcome poster campaign for a rare visit from his Viennese friend Reini to New York: Dear Girls! Be nice to Reini. At the time of her arrival, he pasted them in the streets in the area near his flat. After three years spent in New York, he returned to Austria to serve eight months of compulsory military service. He also designed Confrontation 1990, an optically interesting cubist-fashion set of music posters for the Nickelsdorf Jazz Festival.
During a holiday in Hong Kong in 1991, he became so fascinated by the city and its futuristic atmosphere that he decided to start looking for a job there. He was engaged as a promotional graphic designer by the Leo Burnett Agency, and launched his own autonomous graphic studio under the name of the Leo Burnett Design Group. They gained recognition with their poster for the annual 4A’s competition (Advertising Agency Association Accredited), which mocked the starchiness of official morals. The point of the poster is based on a pun that Sagmeister explained with his traditional humour in the book Sagmeister Made You Look (London, Booth-Clibborn Editions 2001): “When the document called ‘The 4A’s – Call for Entries’ came out of the fax machine, the entire thing practically designed itself. With the four ‘A’s’ as the poster’s focal point, the only remaining question was how to present them.” Sagmeister opted for a Cantonese painting style and, as a result, attendance at the competition rose by 25%. Works by his Design Group Studio won several prizes in local design competitions, but the inflow of commissions and the workload were so intense that after two years of practice in Hong Kong he began to think of a change. In the spring of 1993, he left for Sri Lanka and spent three months in a beach-hut creating fully self-generated books. After this refreshing break, he returned to New York and joined Tibor Kalman’s legendary M&Co Studio. One of his first commissions was the design of invitations for the Gay and Lesbian Taskforce gala. Sagmeister decided to attach a gift pack of banana and a plum to the invitation, thus visualising slang expressions for homosexuals and lesbians. The invitation bore a quotation from the Bible: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” (Matthew 7:20)
When Tibor Kalman decided to close his studio and moved to Rome to work as a full-time editor for Benetton and its Colour magazine, Sagmeister had the opportunity, after six months of practice in Kalman’s company, to open his own studio, Sagmeister Inc. He announced its establishment in an original way, by a card with a photograph of his own naked figure in a deserted-looking studio with stickers that, once removed, revealed the secrets of the advantages for a designer of opening a studio of his own (on 14 January 1994). His wish was to specialise in graphic design for the music industry, and that was why he put on the card three slogans symbolising his creative intent:
“Style = Fart.
We will do anything for design.
Design for the music industry.”
In his work, idea stands above the form. His profession is everything to him, and the last slogan was, at that time, only a pipe dream. In spring 1994, Veronica Oh, of Korean extraction, became his first collaborator. When she left in 1996, Hjalti Karlsson, a graduate from Parsons School of Design, replaced her (he is with Stefan Sagmeister on the cover page of Idea magazine No. 226 – Idea special issue – Work from New York). One of Sagmeister’s first commissions came from his brother Martin, and it was the corporate identity visuals for the Blue company, selling jeans. He intentionally opted for a contrasting logo in orange.
Like any other graphic designer, Stefan Sagmeister makes the best of commissions that give him freedom, in which he can fully develop his own creativity as an artist and use his original humour. Examples may be found in posters for his own exhibitions and lectures, such Fresh Dialogue (1996), featuring two outsize cow’s tongues being stuck out.
His work with fashion designer Anni Kuan began with the design of a logo in 1998. Since then, Sagmeister has designed original invitations for her fashion shows. Each of them is different, sometimes hiding a secret (perhaps a plastic toy horse), sometimes requesting one’s own opinion.
Sagmeister’s design of a provocative poster for the AIGA conference in New Orleans (1997) caused quite a stir among designers. The conference offered a programme with eighty lecturers in two and a half days! The artist expressed the inevitable chaos associated with such programme organisation by the metaphor of a chicken running headlong, emphasised by the inscription: Hurry!, composed of a typeface in the form of chicken legs. All this was topped off with the call: Jambalaya! and handwritten lecturers’ visiting cards.
At present, works for the music industry represent a major part of Stefan Sagmeister’s commissions. A CD is to him an object for which he can fully develop his playful inventiveness, surprising creative solutions and optical tricks. He began with CD booklets for Songs of Maybe, Mountains of Madness by H.P. Zinker, a Swiss jazz band; for Hans Platzgumer’s music band; and for Telling Stories to the Sea, a CD of Afro-Portuguese music.
The design for the album Feelings originated from a David Byrne idea. Sagmeister transformed his portrait into a figure of realistic “Action Man” in plastic, whose face expresses various emotions and makes a live impression on the cover. The booklet was followed by the design for a book of the same name, sold together with a plastic shopping bag.
On the booklet of Set the Twilight Reeling, Sagmeister combines a portrait of Lou Reed with handwritten texts of song lyrics which, together with the photograph, give the impression of a tattoo on his face. According to Reed’s wish, the face should express the transformation of a dark character into a positive personality.
An exceptional and extraordinarily difficult commission for Sagmeister’s studio was work for the Rolling Stones and their Bridges to Babylon (CD and world tour). Stefan found the inspiration for the album title page – the statue of a monumental Assyrian lion with a beard – at the British Museum in London. The plastic cover was complemented with a silver décor, so that the album corresponded to the silver curtain on the stage, designed by Mark Fischer. After some difficult negotiations, the design was accepted and the lion motif, also corresponding with Mick Jagger’s sign of the zodiac, dominated the posters during the band’s world tour.
In 2001, following a one-year break from work, during which he concentrated on his own works inventory, Stefan Sagmeister published the book Sagmeister Made You Look. It quickly sold out and ongoing interest led to a second edition.
At present, Stefan Sagmeister devotes himself to projects with strong social messages. The main point of his work on every purpose is “how to touch the heart with design”.

Marta Sylvestrová