Stefan Sagmeister: Hello everybody. I am a graphic designer. I am Austrian but I live in New York since a very long time. If you look that giant screen outside, it said things I have learnt so far in my life which will be the subject but to give you a - just a little bit of context of what my studio does on a daily basis, I will show you three projects and then I'll get to the main subject. It might be familiar if some of you, it's a Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and we were asked to design the identity for its magnificent building. All I knew was I am not going to use the building in the identity because almost every visual identity built around the building of the client seems very dead and stale to me and we tried for a significant amount of time to get around it until after weeks I realized that the building is a logo. Rem actually calls this the organization of signifiers of meaning, what ever that means. So we just isolated the building as it is. Flipped it around a little bit and stopped it six times. So you have a southern view, a northern view, an eastern view, a western view, top and bottom. Now we had six logos and the way they appear is always in a different stage. We had a logo maker programmed, so you put any image in to logo maker, logo generator in this case Beethoven the generator reads the image and compresses the visual information from that image in to our Casa da Música logo. So this would be Beethoven version and this is how it appears on a fictional Beethoven poster Casa da Música obviously being a big music house in Portugal but if Zappa's music is performed the logo looks like this if Lou Reed's or anybody else's it takes on a different scheme the president of Casa da Música marketing director - musical director get their business cards generated like this. The typography that goes with it and then they have sub identities, they have a house orchestra that looks like this and a the truck for it and a orchestra for contemporary music, that is a fairly obvious solution if you like this. The advantages that not only can we arrive at the identity with this system but it works just equally as well for all the material like poses and programs and all that stuff so we gets one that's so quite, some variations make type with it, switched underneath the skin to have a clubbing night every Saturday night. They have a sort of a come much public festival in - this kids in front of the building in the parking garage a rave and so on and of course it's a musical identity they get free space on Portuguese TV so we have a musician paired up with a 3D artist doing a little piece on every week for a 15 second TV commercial. Switching gears - an organization of 500 American businessmen who got together and thought it was absolutely ridiculous where the amount of military spending is right now in the US taking together to spend to reduce, to petition the US governments to reduce the military spending by 15 percent and spend it on education. I thought it was a great idea because it came from the business community, it was not another liberal group, it's a good idea no way to actually implement it but it was - you know captains of industry who would have a credibility within the American public when it comes to budgets, we have been working this them for the last five years and they are now in a position where their cause is actually heard. I think in '08 with a change in government we have a veryvery big chance of actually succeeding, so with many many things put them all - among them these little inflatable sculptures sculptures on the left you see US and ally military spending, Russia, china and the little black blob on the right is the axis of evil.
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Stefan Sagmeister: So the advantage of working this with on this group is the business community is there is marketing know how, there is money, still there is not enough money so for a while we ran full page ads in the New York times, then we found out that for the exactly same amount of money which was $75,000 for full page ad we could build vehicles. So this is one of them military budget, education budget, foreign aid budget that we have you know running around the US. What happens is that they look very good on TV's or all the local news stations cable news they almost want them and we have had for our $75,000 many many many more imprints than we could have ever gotten from the New York times ad. You get the picture. This one is specifically for that's we wants the we want the educational budget doubled, take two school buses, put them on top of each other - see this the sketch didn't work because it was too high, it didn't clear any bridges so we had to do it as a one window truck and then we got really ambitious and went blimp shopping the idea here being that the blimp is a a speech bubble with a puppet made out of parachute silk right underneath it and a bit of corporate design - a annual report for a lighting company it's the world's largest lighting company with a vacuum formed cover sort of just like a relief of about you know three centimeters high. The brief was only to show the power of light, so we started with this cover and then simply showed that's very cover under lighting conditions and we could play this for a very very long time. I think at the end there were about almost a hundred images of that cover inside that annual report. It's a projection then and of course it contains all the vital informational numbers if any annual report, this is polarized light and this is laser - brings me to my mains subject. In the year 2000, I decided to do an experimental year - a year where we would not do any client work but we really worked on seeds of ideas, much came out of it I could definitely talk for an hour just about that year. One of the things that came out was that unavailability creates desire. So when we are back open for clients, the exact opposite of what I had imagined happened. I thought it would be forgotten and it was the complete opposite even though we re-opened on September 1st 2001, before the September 10. There was no shortage of clients and even more surprising, we started to get jobs with incredible freedom attached. I run a graphic design studio. So we normally get briefs and after that year, we started to get clients that said do something, which turns out to be not so easy for a graphic designer. And in my as I was looking for things to fill space with under the brief; do something, I ran across a little list that I had made in my client free year just a list in the diary of you know, what do I know right now. Took one of those things, and made the plot checked out of it. This first one were magazine dividing pages, fixed double page spreads, this is the first one, everything I do always comes back to me. It seemed at the time like a fairly self indulgent thing and features it because I thought we could. And I was surprised that and I was genuinely surprised I just want to say this upon stage, that we got an incredible amount of difficult to do feedback, because the there was no credit in the magazine. So people that wanted to give us feedback had to contact the magazine, they had to get find our address out and we got many requests for prints that people wanted to hang on walls. So when the city of Paris called and said, we have billboards, do something, it was not very difficult to repeat it, took another thing, trying to look good, limits my life. And you know the sentiments, I think they are fairly straight forward, they are not cynical, the meaning here is simply that my needs to always look good to the sort of fact that be a nice guy can be a quite limiting, or it can box me in. The strategy here was we went to Arizona, photographed one billboard every day. We didn't bring a flash equipment, so we had to back we had to be done by six. And just created the word out of the material we found in the desert in Arizona. This is the way they are hanging in Paris, almost to be visible from one side from one single vantage point and they have been reproduced many times now in different cities, they were in Belgrade a couple of months ago. They went to Scotland, and they are still going. Talking about Scotland, Scottish government at that time the the whole series had taken on the life of its own and clients came to us with the request, we want another thing, we want another sentence. So this is one white monkey in every Scottish Cities. There are six cities in Scotland. Everybody, all these things they are right. Sentiment of course is true for any fights I might have with a printer or with a programmer, as well as of course for all the big fights you know, the word definitely is very much based on this sentiment. A line that came directly out of my experimental year, if I want to explore a new direction professionally, is helpful to try it out first, here done in sugar by Marian Bantjes one of my favorite Canadian typographers, done and redone many times. And connecting to the session before under microscope photography, starting a charity is surprisingly easy, semen here as the surprisingly pollen. We ventured out the little bit. We might show this on the screen, it's two minutes on the you could show it on the large screen if that's possible. So it's a projection that reacts to the viewer as you pass by the spider web, you are ripping it apart, ripping the sentence apart, being not truthful always works against me. Then if rebuilds itself immediately when you are gone, very much like a well like a spider would write it if the spider could could write. And I have seen some quite typographic spider webs. The setup here is very straightforward this is an iMac. It is an iMovie camera and a projector. So it's very run of the mill hardware Ralph Ammer wrote the software for us, that's done from scratch, basically all the typography and the radial lines are made sensitive. Gravity plays a role. Then the camera comes in and gives a very contrasting image wherever the program recognizes the contrast. It interacts it's it builds a force field around the contrast and then that force will interact based sensitive lines of the typography and the radial lines. And as we went along the clients became freer and freer in their briefs, I mean in the beginning it was at least you can do whatever you want, but it has to be magazine pages. In this case it was Singapore who called us. The Media Development Agency of Singapore and they said, do anything, it can be a book, it can be a poster campaign and simply because I didn't know how to do it, I thought why can't we make a film. And it could be shown on the jumbotrons, they have this you know, gigantic screens in malls in Singapore. I said, sure, no problem at all. It was obviously a sentiment dear to my heart, considering that the whole project came out of my diary. So I probably I took it seriously, we can show that on the big screen and dim the light. Changed strategies, in this case, I just took the sentiment and send it over to Ken Mickey one of my favorite Japanese designers and had him do the entire typography on it. This ran first as magazine pages, so it's "money does not make me happy" and I was very it doesn't really come across on the screen here but it has very very fine hues, so I know what a exact designer Ken is so I have we went through many many iterations when we separated the color in lithography and when it was finally right and I signed off on on every thing the litho house sent all the films to the printer, the printer lost one of the double page spreads, didn't tell us, reproduced it themselves so when the magazine appeared, it said, money does does make me happy. And you know, I only like we noticed when we got the magazine as regular subscriber, so there was absolutely nothing we could do about it and you know, months later they wrote do like an eight point retraction you know, Stefan Sagmeister now thinks money doesn't make him happy after all. So there was a desire to run it again, and incredibly the casino in Linz, Linz being the second largest city in Austria agrees to run it on their front, this is the main pedestrians zone in Linz so as you pass the casino by all you see is money, and then when you look down the side street, it says, does not make me happy. And in the mean time I actually met an American psychologist or Daniel Gilbert was at Harvard and who did many studies in this direction and he found that at least in the US it's probably very similar in Europe that from zero to $50,000 so from zero to 40,000 Euros 45,000 Euros now, it's money makes a significant difference in people's lives but above that above 35,000 Euros a year it makes absolutely no measurable difference at all which is a surprising fact that doesn't matter if you make 50,000 bucks, 500,000 bucks, 50 million that in general the your level of comfortableness will remain the same. I can tell a little story about this. When I was a student in Vienna, I took the Vienna subway, and I saw this incredible, fantastic, beautiful old lady come into the subway car. She had a black coat on, black hat with red roses inside looked a little bit like Katharine Hepburn well into her 80's and I had this great urge to tell her how fantastic she is. But I didn't quite have the guts to do so so after sitting there going forward and back should I do it or should I not do it, her station came and she left the subway car and was not my station but just before the bus closed, I jumped out of it as well and then just you know ran after her and said "hey lady hey lady, I just have to tell you something, you are just so incredibly good looking". And she just had this big smile on her face, she just got a huge kick out of it and I thought that from now on I am going to do this every single time and the strange thing is I have learnt many of my other little things that I have learnt though I have really internalized them but this the guts part even though it worked out well every single time when I overcame when I overcame my fears every single time I have not a single instance where I had to say no this was a mistake you should never risk that still I have to talk myself anew into it again. So this is having just the same thing shot from the front shot from the side guts always we definitely have similar themes here with the wonderful flowers from from six feet under. Works out for I think so such as I am the only one for me. Thank you so much.
