Stefan Sagmeister has created album covers for The Rolling Stones and Talking Heads, worked with HBO and the Guggenheim Museum and received two Grammy awards. In September, the designer came to the OFFF festival, which was hosted by the Skillbox educational platform. Here are his thoughts on the design topic and how it should change
Question 1:
– How would you describe the profession and mission of a modern designer? Have they changed over the course of your career?
– In my opinion, the main mission of a designer now is to create works that will help people and bring them joy. This was the case forty years ago, when I was just starting my career, and is still relevant today. Only the tools we work with to achieve this goal have changed.
Question 2:
– What is the most difficult thing about it?
– Actually, to create something that will work and at the same time will be beautiful. Functionality alone is not enough.
People who only talk about solving problems are actually just lazy: in reality, the problems that we solve as designers are very simple.
If I have the task of making a chair design so that it is comfortable enough, I – knowing the ideal chair height and backrest angle – can sketch out fifty options in the morning. But if the task is to make a chair that will be at the same time comfortable, beautiful and relevant for all times, then everything will become much more complicated. We’ll have to compete with five millennia of chair design history.
Question 3:
– In the design community you can very often hear the statement “Design must solve the client’s problems”.
“With a few exceptions, problem solving is too easy for an intelligent person. I’m sure the pursuit of purely functionality is actually bad for functionality itself – look at residential designs from the 1950s and 1960s. They were created to accommodate as many people as possible. It turned out so effectively that in the end the houses themselves became uninhabitable and twenty years later they had to be demolished.
Question 4:
– You are known as a researcher on large and complex topics such as beauty or happiness. What’s the big topic next?
– I think a lot about long-term thinking. Media such as Twitter, and in general the flow of news, which does not stop for a minute, creates the feeling that the world is out of control, democracy is in danger, and in general everything is doomed. But if you look at the development of society from the perspective of long-term development – and this, in my opinion, is the only correct position – the life of mankind is getting better. Fewer people suffer from hunger, die in war or natural disasters. Many more citizens live in a democratic society, live longer – much longer than before. Two hundred years ago, nine out of ten inhabitants of the Earth could not read and write – now it is one in ten.
Even if you look at the statistics of epidemics over the past century: the Spanish flu claimed the lives of 45 million people, AIDS – 30 million. This does not in any way compensate for the colossal 3 million victims of COVID-19 (which is also constantly growing), but it certainly gives a slightly different perspective to “unprecedented times,” as they like to say now.
We have created many visualizations on this topic. Their main goal is to make viewers want to hang posters on their walls as a reminder that a recently posted [toxic] tweet is just a drop in the ocean of a largely healthy environment. You can call these works propaganda in your home.
Question 5:
– How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect you personally? Are you feeling a global change in your work or lifestyle?
– Personally, everything was fine with me. I even conducted a survey among my followers on Instagram, about 5,000 users took part in it – I’m sure they were mostly designers. Most view the pandemic more as an opportunity to try something new – including my girlfriend, who, despite working for a huge corporation, spent time with me in Mexico. We worked hard, but at the same time enjoyed the evenings in a completely new environment.