There are many great designers in the world we live in today. My idea of a designer is someone who defies the way we think,drawing attention and creating visions to inspire the world. One great designer is Stefan Sagmeister.Stefan Sagmesiter was born in 1962, Bregenz, Austria. He studied graphic design at the university of Applied Arts in Vienna. He later was awarded a scholarship to Pratt Institute in New York. He accepted the scholarship and moved to New York in 1987. In order to avoid being drafted into military service, he returned to austria in 1990 for community service. In 1991, he moved to Hong Kong to work the Leo Burnett's Hong Kong Design Group. In 1991, Sagmeister was offered a job position in Hong Kong to work the Leo Burnett's Hong Kong Design Group. He took the offer and moved to Hong Kong. In 1993, he returned to New York to work for a major design firm known as Tibor Kalman's M&Co. In 1993 Stefan started his own company known as Sagmeister Inc.
Sagmeister Inc. is a well known design company in the art world. Stefan has done major design projects with major companies like Rolling Stones Magazine and HBO. Sagmeister has worked on Alblum art and promotions for Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, Skeleton Key, and Talking Heads. For Lou Reed, Sagmeister designed a poster announcing the album Set the Twighlight. The poster depicts a profile black and white shot of Reed. Written all over his face in a gothic type font, are lyrics from various songs in the album. For Mick Jagger Sagmeister , he went to a British museum in London where he took many pictures of the Babylonian collection. From all the works of art, Sagmeister chose the Assyrian lion for the cover of the Rolling Stones album. The Assyrian lion turned out to be an excellent choice for the album cover as well as for touring use and merchandizing. For the Skeleton Key album entitled Fantastic Spikes through a Balloon he gathered many pictures that depicted a balloon. Images chosen were a blowfish, a sausage and a fart cushion. Sagmeister chose the sausage. After the image was chosen he decided to put holes literally through the album cover, symbolizing the album title. The design work for the band Talking Heads was also album work. The album entitled Once In a Lifetime was a box set, so there were a lot of pictures included. The box set folds out to one long picture by Russian painter Vladimir Dubussaraski. The pictures consist of babies, bears, lions, severed limbs, and the naked form.
In 1994 Stefan Sagmeister was nominated for a Grammy award for his album cover “Mountains of Madness”. In 1996 he began to construct finished posters for AIGA (the american institue of graphic arts) In 1999, Sagmeister overlooked his career and decided to close his studio for commercial work and concentrated on his personal visions/ ideas. in 2001 Sagmeister wrote and released the book ‘Made You Look”. This book is a very inventive book making a dsigner rethink their revision processes. In 2005, Sagmeister won another Grammy award. The award was given for his work as art director of the art design of Once in a Lifetime’ album.
Works Cited:
www.designboom.com/eng/interview/sagmeister.htm
www.sagmeister.com
designmuseum.org/design/stefan-sagmeister
