(Philip Greenberg for
The New York Times)
This week’s guest blogger is the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister. Sagmeister is known for his stunning and original approach to the design of album art, magazine spreads, advertising and installation works. He often takes a renegade, DIY approach to type; in 1999 he made a poster by photographing words he had scratched onto his torso. (His design for the Talking Heads box set earned him a Grammy award.) Sagmeister’s work as been exhibited around the world; his current solo show, “Things I have Learned in my Life so Far,” is showing at Deitch Projects in New York.
I have always avoided blogs, partly because writing is difficult for me (that’s why I became a designer) and partly because they seem to bring out a mean streak in many of us.
Having said that, as a reader I am also much more attracted to negative comments then to positive ones — they just seem to be so much more fun to read. I guess that’s why all media carry more bad than good news. (Apparently all attempts to build a positive newspaper failed quickly because of an utter lack of readership.)
I’ll be your guest blogger all week long, and I’ll post about all the things I have learned in my life so far.
Years ago I found a list under that very same title, “Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far,” in my diary. At the time I was searching hard for content to use in the design of a series of magazine spreads. The client allowed us to do what ever we wanted — there was no brief involved, which turned out to be much harder than anticipated.
What do you design when you can do anything?
After month of fruitless searching I eventually picked one of the things on said list: “Everything I do always comes back to me.” With the help of everyone in my studio, I created typography out of this.
I thought of this as a rather self-indulgent exercise and was therefore surprised by the amount of feedback we received, with numerous people writing us asking for prints. They were likely to wind up in bathrooms; here is a shot of one of our maxims in a toilet in Israel.
Some weeks later, another client called with a wide-open brief (“Do something, anything”). This time we were to design billboards for Paris. I just picked another sentence from that diary list: “Trying to look good limits my life.” This did not necessarily refer to a good physical appearance (since I am following last weeks guest blogger Hana Soukupova I would not dare). I meant that my need to always be a nice guy, my need to appear cheerful — even when I am not or in situations where I should not be — is confining.
They were all photographed in Arizona. The designer Matthias Ernstberger and I rented a large-format camera in the desert. Our task was to build and photograph one word every day, five billboards in five days. This turned out to be much more fun than sitting in front of the screen Photoshopping.
100 greetings from lovely 14 Street… I’ll be back tomorrow.