2013 AIGA Medalist: Stefan Sagmeister

Born in Bregenz, Austria in 1962, Sagmeister began his unorthodox career at age 15 writing for Alphorn, a small, left-wing magazine, but quickly realized that working on the layout was more enjoyable than writing articles. He earned an M.F.A. at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna in 1985, and received a Fulbright scholarship to study at Pratt Institute in New York. Even as a young designer he was peripatetic: he took a position with the Leo Burnett Hong Kong Design Group in 1991. Surprisingly, the job did not trigger his atavistic rebellion, but it did give him a taste for other worlds.

During his student days in New York, Sagmeister had courted another design bad boy, Tibor Kalman, of M&Co. “Tibor Kalman was the single most influential person in my design-y life and my one and only design hero,” Sagmeister told me. “Twenty-five years ago, as a student in NYC, I called him every week for half a year, and I got to know the M&Co receptionist really well. When he finally agreed to see me, it turned out I had a sketch in my portfolio rather similar in concept and execution to an idea M&Co was just working on. He rushed to show me the prototype out of fear I’d later say he stole it out of my portfolio. I was so flattered.”

When M&Co eventually hired Sagmeister five years later, in 1993, Sagmeister discovered that Kalman had an uncanny knack for giving wisdom-laced advice, which had a deep influence on him as he began cultivating his own career. Perhaps most importantly, Kalman encouraged Sagmeister’s own creative restlessness: “Tibor was always happy and ready to jump from one field to another: corporate design, products, city planning, music videos, documentary movies, children’s books and magazine editing were all treated under the mantra, ‘You should do everything twice. The first time you don’t know what you’re doing. The second time you do. The third time it’s boring,’” Sagmeister said.

After M&Co abruptly disbanded, when Kalman moved to Rome to edit Benetton’s COLORS magazine, Sagmeister began to specialize in CD cover design. “I get a bigger kick out of meeting some of my musical heroes than sitting in meetings with a marketing director, which I did a lot before I opened my own specialized studio,” he explained in an interview with me a dozen years ago.

I.D. magazine, which in the late ’90s was Sagmeister’s most avid promoter, wrote that his “CD package designs are what poetry is to prose: distilled, intense, cunning, evocative and utterly complete. His intentions have set a new standard.” Designing for his musical heroes—Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, David Byrne and Jay-Z among them—enabled Sagmeister to create unique artworks based on the artists’ personas. He used printing and packaging tricks that involved laser-cuts, die-cuts, model building and more, but the witty, elegant and eclectic concepts were the engine that drove the outcome, and he received two Grammy Awards for his designs.

During the early 2000s Sagmeister was totally invested in this genre and medium. In an interview, I asked him if he wanted to continue with this specialty or enter general practice. He responded in the affirmative without hesitation. I asked if he saw graphic design as a viable practice for future generations: “I personally believe that print is going to be around for a very, very long time,” he replied. “If I’m wrong, future designers will have to be screen-based….I’d rather move to Sri Lanka and build a house than become a website designer.”

But Sagmeister encountered a different vision of the future while on a trip to Seoul, South Korea, in 2003: the MP3 on handheld devices. After returning to New York, he substituted the record-packaging class he taught for the Designer as Author M.F.A. program at the School of Visual Arts with another course, reasoning that in two years or less the CD would be irrelevant—and so would its design.