Spotlight Piece

Stefan Sagmeister is a well-known designer known best for his out-of-the-box designs. Born August 6, 1962, in Bregenz, Austria began his career working in print media at the young age of 15. He started out working for Alphorn, a small left-wing magazine, where he discovered his interest in working on layout design rather than simply writing articles (Heller). In 1985 Sagmeister earned his MFA at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, he was also granted a Fulbright scholarship for the Pratt Institute of New York (Heller).

As a college student studying in New York City, he became fascinated with Tibor Kalman from the design firm M&Co. In an interview, Sagmeister claimed, “Tibor Lakman was the single most influential person in my design-y life and my one and only design hero” (Heller). In 1993 Sagmeister was later granted the opportunity to work for M&Co 1993 before it broke apart out of nowhere after Kalman went to work for another magazine in Rome. (Heller).

After the break of M&Co, Sagmeister found a passion for designing CD covers, where he was very successful and earned two Grammys for his work. He worked with a number of famous clients such as Mick Jagger and Jay-Z. Each cover design was unique to the artist because he designed based on their personality. However, he understood that the relevance of CDs was coming to an end after a trip to South Korea in 2003 where he was introduced to handheld MP3 players (Heller). Sagmeister made the decision to take a one-year sabbatical in Bali to figure out his plans for years to come. Upon his return, he made the decision to work in text-based artwork because of the belief that it would be around for years to come (Heller).