Interview with Stefan Sagmeister | Sound Authors Radio
November 2, 2008
Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! Today is Friday, June 13th. It’s thought of as a pretty spooky day, an unlucky day but let’s think of it as a unique day, one we don’t see that often. It’s the birthday of William Butler Yates; of course he’s not around anymore, he died 69 years ago but he was born on this day in 1865 and much more to think about on this day. I have four guests on the show. My first guest is world famous artist, author, and ne’er do well Stephan Sagmeister. My second guest is Julia Hallisy, my third guest will be Aaron Lazar and my last guest is a musician of course on sound authors we always feature musicians along with the authors and her name is Molly Mason of the famous duet of Jay Ungar and Molly Mason. My first guest, his name is Stephan Sagmeister and he is well known for doing among other things cover art for the Rolling Stone, Lou Reed and many others. His new book is called In My Life So Far. Its gorgeous, it’s striking, it’s new. Welcome to the show Stephan Sagmeister.
Stephen Sagmeister: Thanks so much for having me, it’s a pleasure.
Dr. Kent: Did I say your name correctly?
Stephen Sagmeister: Absolutely.
Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about this book, In My Life So Far. It’s so interesting. It’s not something that you page from page to page. You can lay it out across the table, you can mix and match. What was the idea behind it?
Stephen Sagmeister: Well it’s basically a little magazine that I found in my diary. At one time I had set down and really tried to think about what had I actually done so far in my life. What do I know by now and made a little list. It was one of the many lists that I made. In my design company we work for clients and even there we started to get clients that really gave us an incredible amount of freedom that basically said oh we have a book that we want to fill up but we don’t want to fill it up with promotional advertising, what can we fill it with?
So in answer to that question we take things from the diary and these little things I’ve learned from my life so far and published them. To give you an example, let’s say the city of Paris has billboards and we took five billboards with very large, complex typography put up there trying to look good in my life. The magazine comes out of this realization that my fear of competition or the designer always to be the nice guy can be fairly limiting in itself. We put it up all over Paris; it seemed like a very self indulgent thing for me at the time but we got lots of reaction.
It wasn’t not only oh can you send me a print I would like to glue them next to my toilet bowl and reminded of it. As we went along, more and more reactions came and we did more and more magazines, pretty much all over the world. The book Things I’ve Done in My Life So Far really features I think 20 of them. Originally they show from Japan to Lisbon and put all together in publication.
Dr. Kent: Not only do you have this In My Life So Far, this brand new book, but there’s a website where you invite other people to contribute. Tell me a little about www.thingsihavelearnedinmylife.com.
Stephen Sagmeister: So that’s because of the book about eight weeks ago we put that site up inviting everybody who thinks that they have learned something. Of course I would invite all of your listeners to write that down and design it in a way that they feel is appropriate to what they’ve learned and then upload it. You just go to thingsihavelearnedinmylife.com and in the beginning you can check out all the stuff up there.
There are hundreds of magazines up there that have been put up. There’s a wonderful book up there already. I remember I think one of the things that comes to my mind quickly is a taste for a sort of two image piece up there where you are going down a mountain says if you are not crashing you are not trying and the second picture you see him all bruised up with a big fat smile on his face and says you are not trying.
Dr. Kent: What inspired you to do this book? You had friends that said look at all these journal entries or was it in yourself that you decided to do this? Where was the core of the project?
Stephen Sagmeister: As a designer I actually do a good number of presentations and here and there you know about our book. Sometimes in front of channel audiences, sometimes in front of live audiences pretty much around the world and here and there I show some pieces of the series and I always got the most resonance with them.
So I started to do presentations that only had these series in there, that didn’t show any of our other books, no record covers, no identity just to see pieces and again I got a very good resonance. So from there it was a pretty short step to say oh it probably must be a neat thing to have all 20 of them collected for a presentation.
Dr. Kent: What exactly when you were a young artist where did your style develop? Because in looking at this book and looking at your websites, in looking at your album covers and all of that you have a style. Where did that start to form?
Stephen Sagmeister: Well I grew up in the Austrian Alps in a very small town that is a beautiful area so I think that was one set of influences that definitely came from there. Starting with the apartment I grew up in, there were many signs from my granddad hanging about. My granddad was a known sign painter early in the 19th century. So we had a lot of his magazines here in and he was a conservative man but he was long gone by the end of the 19th century. He was still working in that style as he carefully got typography on them.
That’s basically what the situation in our apartment. Outside, if you take a step outside there was a lake in the Austrian Alps a good number of ### that again would sell little ### with magazines on them. Then I went to Oslo which of course is much more open influences in the depression but also in England we had a group called the Vienna 1900 in the recession that also new England was from in the 70s we had a group and it was called the Influential Group in Vienna Extremists of a great number of famous artists or important artists in Austria came out of.
I think because I grew up in a small town I always had this desire to live in a big city. The first time I saw New York I realized very quickly that this was kind of the mogul of metropolis was a symbol of a big city and I wanted to live here and got a scholarship to study here. I’ve loved it ever since.
Dr. Kent: With your design and your artwork it’s always fascinating that whatever you’re doing it seems like it’s emerging out of the space that’s already there if its something that’s concrete. Who did you look at as being influences? Was it Warhol, was it the abstract artists? Where was your great inspiration?
Stephen Sagmeister: Probably the biggest thing influencing my life was another designer who used to be a boss of mine. His name is Peter Collins. He used to run a company here in New York called ### company. He probably might be best known for being the creator of that magazine called Colors that was a very influential magazine in the 80s and 90s.
I would think that him and his staffs approach as well as his socially caring approach and big heart really was a big influence from many angles. I always kept my studio very small because in the design world the only thing more difficult than design is to figure out how not to grow. Everything else is pretty easy and that turned out to be very virtual and in many other cases. Peter died very early that I’m still very good friends with his widow Myra Collins who is a fantastic illustrator I know in her own right.
Dr. Kent: You have a unique thought about branding. Branding is of course in the business world, everything is the brand. What’s your take on that?
Stephen Sagmeister: I think that many other things its power is completely over estimated by the practitioners. If you listen to the head of an international branding agency, you will think that they have influence over our minds that we couldn’t even begin to understand. At one time I worked in these places and we met many of the people who were running these places. By and large they are a surprisingly unintelligent group of people that would love to manipulate our ways but when it comes down to it not quite intelligent enough to me.
In most cases I found that the average consumer make decisions on the quality of a product or a service if that product is in a category that is actually possible. I think branding has surprisingly little influence in product and service categories, we can know the difference. Coffee for example, most people know the difference between a good cup of coffee and a bad cup of coffee, branding though is almost a stamp of approval but in a minor role. A bigger role is how good is that cup of coffee? In other categories, let’s say vodka. Vodka consumers have not a clue between a good vodka and a bad vodka and they of course base their decisions on is it a beautiful bottle, do I like the name?
Typical branding items. But I think that those categories where the consumer really doesn’t have a clue are in the minority. In most other ways its pretty much is the product good or is the product bad? If you look at a brand realistically of course its part of the brand but its not what most international branding agencies have an influence on. It’s basically the company.
Dr. Kent: So, you’re sort of well known for this what they call hand-made design, which is something that is really gorgeous and sometimes shocking. Where did those ideas come from and how have they been accepted by the public?
Stephen Sagmeister: Well I think that I’ve realized that we now have about 80 years of modernism. If I look at the foundation of modernism, be it ###, its been 80 years and at least 40-50 of those 80 years modernism has been predating the dominant styles throughout the world of pretty much anything. Be it product design or graphic design. And of course initially there was an incredible reason and desire for this simplicity and this form full of function for this to happen.
Now that we have it as the status quo over the years, an unbelievable amount of simple boring things have come out of this movement and very much mechanical development has happened. If you ask a regular consumer, I don’t know if I ask my mom who designed this book or who designed this website? She would probably think a machine did it. Or, who designed this newspaper? She would be completely unaware. She would be aware that there was a journalist who wrote that article but she would be totally unaware that there was probably a designer designing the typeface, designing how that article was laid out and that there was many meetings involved behind it. So I think there is a pretty valid sense of making or bringing some subjectivity back into this.
Some human touch if you will and I’m not even arguing that every piece of design should be done per se, I don’t know say a time table for the port authority probably doesn’t need to have a human touch it can show a table that shows the time in a pleasing and concise manner. But even there, let’s say that I look at the emergency exit instructions in the planes. I actually collect these things. I have hundreds of them. They look the same pretty much from every airline. You have the modernist, simplistic icons of little figures, some of those pulling on emergency handles and so on.
Now pretty much in every plane I’ve ever been when they do the emergency drill it almost never see anybody taking that card out of the backseat pocket in front of them and actually look at it because they’re just so boring. There’s now a couple of airlines, Virgin Atlantic is one of them, that redesigned those much sweeter with a little bit of fun in it. They tell you the same content in a more pleasing manner. Last time I took a plane to London on Virgin, I actually, not the whole plane, but I saw eight, nine, ten people actually checking it out. So I think even in these very factual very dry situations, there is room for some more emotion.
Dr. Kent: It’s really been an honor speaking with you and through the years in perusing through your biography its extraordinary how many places I have seen your artwork in the past from album covers to other things. This book is extraordinary. In My Life So Far; it’s beautiful, it’s something you can, I mean I plan to put it on the table and look at it again and again. So it’s been a real honor, this is a gorgeous book.
Stephen Sagmeister: Well, thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure.
Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show will be a woman named Julia Hallisy; come on back for that, its going to be a good one.
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