Stefan Sagmeister


Stefan Sagmeister is an Austrian graphic designer, storyteller, and typographer based in New York City. In 1993, Sagmeister founded his company, Sagmeister Inc., to create designs for the music industry. He has designed album covers for Lou Reed, OK Go, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Jay Z, Aerosmith, Talking Heads, Brian Eno and Pat Metheny. From 2011 until 2019 he partnered with Jessica Walsh under the name Sagmeister & Walsh Inc.
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Early life and education

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. He later won a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree.

Design career

In 1991, Sagmeister worked 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. In 1993, he set up his company Sagmeister Inc in New York. He has since designed branding, graphics, and packaging for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO, the Guggenheim Museum and Time Warner. He is the author of the design monograph "Made You Look" which was published by Booth-Clibborn editions. He teaches in the graduate design department of the School of Visual Arts in New York and was previously the Frank Stanton Chair at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York.

Works and projects

Stefan Sagmeister has produced multiple exhibitions that blend graphic design with research, interactive installation, and thematic inquiry. His exhibitions often combine visual communication with broader questions about human experience, perception, and data.

The Happy Show

The Happy Show is a thematic exhibition centered on Sagmeister’s ten‑year exploration of happiness and how it can be understood and shaped. First presented in 2012 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, it subsequently toured major institutions including the Design Exchange in Toronto, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main in 2016.
The show features a mix of experimental typography, infographics, film, print, sculpture and interactive installations that encourage visitors to engage directly with concepts related to happiness. Sagmeister incorporated personal experiments such as tests of meditation, cognitive behavioural therapy, and mood enhancers alongside scientific and social data from psychologists and researchers like Daniel Gilbert, Steven Pinker, and Jonathan Haidt, placing individual experience in a broader context.

Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty

Presented in 2019, Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty was developed in collaboration with designer Jessica Walsh and shown at venues including the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt/Main and the MAK in Vienna.
His multimedia exhibition examined the concept of beauty through examples from graphic design, product design, architecture, and urban planning. The show aimed to explore why people are drawn to beauty and how aesthetic qualities influence perception and everyday experience, arguing that beauty is not merely decorative but can have functional value.
The exhibition included around 70 object groups and installations across themed sections such as “What is Beauty,” “The Eye of the Beholder,” and “Transformational Beauty,” inviting visitors to engage with beauty in varied contexts.

Now Is Better

Now Is Better is a long‑term project that Sagmeister and his studio have developed since 2019, with major public showings in 2023 and 2024. It visualizes long‑term statistical data including trends in democracy, war and peace, health, and literacy by embedding contemporary graphic compositions into 18th‑ and 19th‑century historical paintings.
The exhibition debuted at Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York and has toured internationally, including at the GGG Gallery in Tokyo and at venues in Seoul, South Korea.

It’s Getting Better

In 2024, Sagmeister presented It’s Getting Better at the K11 Museum in Shanghai, an expanded iteration of the Now Is Better concept. The exhibition featured more than 100 works spread over 850 m² of gallery space.
In addition to data‑derived visual works, his exhibition included documentary materials and everyday objects such as water glasses and apparel connected to the exhibit’s themes. He designed to provide a comprehensive view of the long‑term trends represented in the project and to encourage visitors to consider shifts in global conditions over time.

Better and Better (Besser und Besser)

Better and Better is a site‑specific installation presented at an altitude of over 3,000 metres in Sölden, Tyrol, Austria.
This project situates Sagmeister’s visual interventions in a high‑altitude location, integrating historic paintings with contemporary graphic inserts that often visualize local Austrian data. The setting the Ice Q glass cube at the mountaintop emphasizes the context of the works and the long‑term perspective that Sagmeister’s exhibitions explore.

Controversy

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. The organizers apologized to the interpreter in person, and to attendees following the incident, and on Twitter. Sagmeister later apologized through the Sagmeister & Walsh Twitter account, and from his personal Instagram account.

Awards

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. In 2013 Sagmeister was awarded the Golden Medal of Honor of the Republic of Austria.
In 2018, he was voted Austrian of the Year by the Austrian newspaper Die Presse.

Exhibitions

Filmography

  • ''The Happy Film''