Stefan Sagmeister

He began his design career at the age of 15 at "Alphorn", an Austrian Youth magazine, which is named after the traditional Alpine musical instrument. Sagmeister studied graphic design at the Hochschule fuer Angewandte Kunst, Vienna, graduating in 1986.[1][2] He later won a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree.[3]

In 1991, he moved to Hong Kong to work with Leo Burnett's Hong Kong Design Group. In 1993, he returned to New York to work with Tibor Kalman's M&Co design company. 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 Treviso, Italy.[4]

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.

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, Japan, Osaka, Prague, Cologne, and Seoul. He teaches in the graduate design department of the School of Visual Arts in New York and has been appointed as the Frank Stanton Chair at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York.

He has spent many years designing for the music industry. Several years ago he decided to dedicate 25% of his work to the art world, things like books and publications for galleries, another 25% to the scientific community, 25% to social causes, and the remaining quarter has stayed dedicated to the music industry.[5]

Sagmeister became the subject of controversy after his performance of a lewd joke about animal fellatio at the annual web conference Webstock in Wellington, New Zealand, in February 2017, embarrassing a sign language interpreter and upsetting some in the audience.[6] The organizers apologized to the interpreter in person, and to attendees following the incident, and on Twitter.[7] Webstock organizers also followed this apology up with a longer statement on their blog.[8]

The joke, according to Fast Company, involved having a sign language interpreter assigned to his talk "interpret a story about a manatee giving itself a blowjob", with repeated requirements to the interpreter to use gestures to indicate the sex act.[6]

Sagmeister later apologized through the Sagmeister & Walsh Twitter account,[9] and from his personal Instagram account.[10]

Sagmeister received a Grammy Award in 2005 in the Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package category for art directing Once in a Lifetime box set by Talking Heads. He received a second Grammy Award for his design of the David Byrne and Brian Eno album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today in the Grammy Award for Best Recording Package category on January 31, 2010.

In 2005, Sagmeister won the National Design Award for Communications from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.[11] In 2013 Sagmeister was awarded the Golden Medal of Honor of the Republic of Austria.[12]

In 2018 he was voted Austrian of the Year by the Austrian newspaper Die Presse.[13]

2000 Design Biannual, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York

2001 Stealing Eyeballs, Kunstlerhaus, Vienna; Solo exhibition, Gallery Frédéric Sanchez, Paris

2002 Solo exhibition, Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna

2003 Solo exhibition, Museum fur Gestaltung, Zurich, Switzerland; Solo exhibition, DDD Gallery Tokyo[5]

2012 The Happy Show, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia[14]

2013 The Happy Show, Design Exchange, Toronto[15]

2013 The Happy Show. MOCA, at Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles[16]

2013 Jewish Museum, New York[17]

2013 The Happy Show, Chicago Cultural Center[18]

2013 The Happy Show, Paris, Gaite Lyrique[19]

2015 The Happy Show, Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna

2015 The Happy Show, The Museum of Vancouver, Vancouver, Canada[20]

2015 The Happy Show, Museum für angewandte Kunst Frankfurt[21]

2018/2019 Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty, Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna[22]

2019 Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty, Mak Frankfurt[23]

2019 Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg[24]

2021 Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty Fondation d’entreprise Martell

2021 Beautiful Numbers, Thomas Erben Gallery

2022 Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty Vorarlberg Museum, Bregenz, Austria[25]

• The Happy Film (2016, documentary)[26]

• Sagmeister, Stefan: Made You Look - Peter Hall (Booth-Clibborn, 2001) ISBN 978-1-86154-207-6; also Abrams paperback edition (2009): ISBN 978-0-8109-0597-9
• Sagmeister, Stefan; Things I have learned in my life so far (2008) New York:Abrams, ISBN 978-0-8109-9529-1
• Sagmeister Stefan, Another Book About Promotion & Sales Material, New York, Abrams 2011, ISBN 1419701398
• Sagmeister & Walsh, Beauty, Phaidon Press; 2018, ISBN 978-0714877273

• Category:Albums with cover art by Stefan Sagmeister

• Official website
• London Design Museum's entry for Sagmeister