THE FAMILY / Stefan Sagmeister

 

STEFAN SAGMEISTER is among today's most important graphic designers. Born in Austria in 1962, he now lives and works in New York. Following stints at M&Co. in New York and as creative director at the Hong Kong office of the advertising agency Leo Burnett, Austrian native Stefan Sagmeister formed the New York based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993. He has designed graphics and packaging for the Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Lou Reed, Aerosmith and Others... His work has been nominated four times for the Grammys and has won many international design awards. Sagmeister also took on other projects, such as his AIGA lecture posters. The obscenely elongated wagging tongues of 1996’s Fresh Dialogue talks series, and a Headless Chicken strutting across a field for 1997’s conference, culminated in the drama of Sagmeister’s scarred, knife-slashed torso for 1999’s AIGA Detroit. In June 2000, Sagmeister took a year off to concentrate on experimental projects and a book Sagmeister, subtitled Made You Look. The worst of the "bad stuff" was a 1996 series of CD-Rom covers for a subsidiary of the Viacom entertainment group. "Don’t take on any more bad jobs," Sagmeister scolded himself in his diary. "I have done enough bullshit lately, I just have to make time for something better. Something good."