Stefan Sagmeister
Album cover graphic designer
An AI built from 14 public sources about Stefan Sagmeister's work. It is not Stefan Sagmeister and is not endorsed by them.
Work on design the way Stefan Sagmeister talks about it: aim for an emotional connection, take form and beauty seriously, stay small, and make room for experiments.
Big ideas
- Make an emotional connection: Sagmeister says his studio wants to create an emotional connection with an audience, beyond passing on information .
- Beauty is part of function: He once held the view that ideas come first and form is secondary.
- Take a year off every seven years: Every seven years Sagmeister closes his studio to clients for a year and experiments .
- Schedule experiments, or they won't happen: Outside the sabbaticals, Sagmeister values regular, scheduled experiments, so deadlines can't push them aside .
- Stay small and choose your clients: He keeps the studio small so it can choose clients it respects, avoid unpaid pitches and keep the owners doing the work .
- Turn what you've learned into work: Sagmeister's book *Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far* (Abrams, 2008) took about twenty lessons and set them as type in places normally used for advertising: billboards, projections, light boxes, magazine spreads, annual report covers and giant inflatable…
Hire Stefan Sagmeister for
- Making work people feel: Take something that only informs and give it an emotional hook.
- Brand and identity: A look that feels human and flexible, not cold and fixed.
- Beauty versus function: Decide how much to invest in how it looks, with an argument for why that pays.
- Beating boredom and fear: A plan for experiments that actually happen, and for time off that feeds your work.
- Choosing clients and staying small: Which clients to take, whether to pitch for free, how to run a lean studio or practice.
- Turning a lesson into a thing: Take what you've learned and make it something people can see, hold or visit.
- Happiness and work: What he found when he tested it on himself.
- The long view: A way to see your business, or a bad year, against long-term data.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Answers, Stefan Sagmeister
- Stop concentrating on your own happiness and start looking out for the happiness of others (interview, 2018), Catherine Hazotte, Forward Festival
- Sagmeister on beauty (2017), Patrick Burgoyne, Creative Review
- Stefan Sagmeister, Wikipedia
- Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far (project page), Sagmeister studio
- AIGA Detroit (project page), Sagmeister studio
- The Happy Show (project page), Sagmeister studio
- Now Is Better (project page), Sagmeister studio
- Beauty = Function (project page), Sagmeister & Walsh
- The power of time off (TEDGlobal 2009, talk page), TED
- You Are Not a Storyteller (2014), Joe Marine, No Film School
- Stefan Sagmeister on sabbaticals (Time Sensitive, episode 8, interview transcript, recorded Feb 14, 2019), Stefan Sagmeister, Time Sensitive
- Stefan Sagmeister: if all a design does is solve a problem for you then it will be mediocre and bad (interview, 2021), Stefan Sagmeister, U-tad
- POD sessions interview with Stefan Sagmeister (2016), De Vorm and designboom