The whole question of art versus design has limited interest – it comes in waves, in the 20th century there were times when art and design were embedded in each other, the Bauhaus for instance, and then they separated, and then they came back together, and then they separated… from the viewer’s point of view, it’s always just a question of ‘is it good or not?’.”

But from a viewer’s point of view it doesn’t matter. “I see it all as graphic design, It’s made by a graphic design office in mediums normally employed by design and all has a client behind it. Sagmeister however sees things a little more simplisticly: Sagmeister defies his titles expectations and blurs lines between practices acting as an artist, graphic designer and typographer all across one piece of work. Looking at graphic design from the perspective of an illustrator, especially one who puts such stock in illustrations humanity and idiosyncrasies as one of its greatest strengths, graphic design can often feel stark and impersonal by comparison. The dry biography nonsense aside, Sagmeister is truly interesting because the sheer amount of personality and humour he can insert into his work, no matter who he is working for his work feels distinctly his own. Stefan Sagmeister was born in Austria in 1962 where he later studied Graphic Design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, he then attained his masters degree at the Pratt Institute in New York where began his first design firm Sagmeister Inc working with prolific musicians such as Lou Reed and Rolling Stones.

Stefan sagmeister things i have learned