Stefan Sagmeister

Stefan Sagmeister (born 1962 in Bregenz, Austria) is a graphic designer and typographer currently based in New York City. He has his own design firm, Sagmeister Inc. He has designed album covers for Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Aerosmith and Pat Metheny.

Biography

Sagmeister studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He later received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York.

In 1991, he moved to Hong Kong to work the Leo Burnett's Hong Kong Design Group. In 1993, he returned to New York to work Tibor Kalman's M&Co design firm. His tenure there was short lived, as Kalman soon decided to retire from the design business to edit Colors magazine for the Benetton Group in Rome.

Stefan Sagmeister proceeded to form the New York based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993 and has since designed branding, graphics, and packaging for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO, the Guggenheim Museum and Time Warner. Sagmeister Inc. has employed designers including Martin Woodtli; and Hjalti Karlsson and Jan Wilker, who later formed Karlssonwilker.

Stefan Sagmeister is a long-standing artistic collaborator with musicians David Byrne and Lou Reed. He is the author of the design monograph "Made You Look" which was published by Booth-Clibborn editions.

Solo shows on Sagmeister Inc's work have been mounted in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Tokyo, Osaka, Prague, Cologne, and Seoul. He teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Art in New York and has been appointed as the Frank Stanton Chair at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York.

He has received a Grammy Award in 2005 in Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package category for art directing Once in a Lifetime box set by Talking Heads.

Further reading

• Sagmeister: Made You Look - Peter Hall (Booth-Clibborn, 2001)
• Sagmeister: Things I have learned in my Life so far (Abrams 2008)

External links

• Sagmeister Inc.
• London Design Museum's entry for Sagmeister
• Video interview with Sagmeister in hillmancurtis' Artist Series
• Sagmeister lecture - "How Good is Good?"
• Interview with Sagmeister in PingMag
• Interview with Sagmeister on ScribeMedia.org
• Video of presentation by Sagmeister at PICNIC07 in Amsterdam, September 2007