For the past thirty years, Austrian graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister has been bringing a fresh yet singular look at various layers of contemporary society. Ahead of his talk “This will be boring” at KIKK Festival, he talked us through his work and influences as well as design’s fantastic ability to explore people’s feelings.

Let’s start with the beginning: how did you first step into graphic design? What were the key events and motivations that led you to develop a career in that field?

I wanted to become a designer. I had joined a small local youth magazine called Alphorn and discovered there that I was much more interested in creating the lay-outs than writing the articles. Furthermore I was fascinated by album covers and thought that would be a wonderful thing to do with my life.

How would you define your artistic approach? Can you name a couple of pieces that best summarize your work?

I was always interested in how design touches me emotionally, and eventually put a talk together titled “Design and Happiness” (which had slowly evolved out of another presentation called “Can Design touch someone’s Heart?”). That direction has been a guiding principle for the studio.

Can you name some of your biggest influences?

Tibor Kalman was the single most influential person in my designy life and my one and only design hero. 35 years ago, as a student in NYC, I called him every week for half a year and I got to know the M&Co receptionist really well. When he finally agreed to see me it turned out I had a sketch in my portfolio rather similar in concept and execution than an idea M&Co was just working on: he rushed to show me the prototype out of fear I’d say later he stole it out of my portfolio. I was so flattered. When I finally started working there 5 years later, I discovered it was — more than anything else — his incredible salesmanship that set his studio apart from all the others. There were probably a number of people around who were as smart as Tibor — and there were certainly a lot who were better at designing —, but nobody else could sell these concepts without any changes, get those ideas with almost no alterations out into the hands of the public. Nobody else was as passionate. As a boss, he had no qualms about upsetting his clients or his employees (I remember his reaction to a logo I had worked on for weeks and was very proud of: “Stefan, this is TERRIBLE, just terrible, I am so disappointed”). His big heart was shining through nevertheless. Tibor had the guts to risk everything (…) he had an uncanny knack for giving advice, for dispersing morsels of wisdom, packaged in rough language later known as Tiborisms: “The most difficult thing when running a design company is not to grow,” he told me when I opened my own little studio. He was always happy and ready to jump from one field to another, corporate-design, products, city planning, music video, documentary movies, children books, magazine editing were all treated under the mantra “you should do everything twice, the first time you don’t know what you’re doing, the second time you do, the third time it’s boring”. He did good work containing good ideas for good people.

In the mid-nineties, you’ve started working with rock bands and musicians such as The Rolling Stones, Talking Heads and Lou Reed. How did these collaborations happen? What did you learn from this work?

I wanted to combine my two interests, design and music. But I had no connections to the music world whatsoever, and just cold called the record companies trying to get an appointment. After a full year of trying, this finally bore fruit. We all but stopped designing album covers after the first sabbatical in 2000 – there were just too many other interesting things to design and music stopped playing the same role in my life as I approached forty. I do miss the simple act of visualizing music. This never got old.

What are your thoughts on graphic design and visual art in the digital era? How can it be relevant and impactful?

Every giant change in design was chiefly brought about by a change in technology, from Gutenberg to the invention of lithography. The Mac changed everything one more time. On the positive side, the field became much wider, as related professions (animations, sound, product design, etc.) utilized the same hardware with simple software variations and made incorporating the tools and strategies of these other professions more likely. The Mac allowed new fields in design to flourish (interactive, generative, web-related etc.). On the down side, our everyday lives are threatened to become a bore, as we exchanged a profession that required the mastery of a myriad of tools to be performed in different rooms (silk-screening, painting, letterpress printing, etc.) to a steady position behind a single screen. AI is rewriting the rules again right now.

Humans’ visualization of long-term thinking seems to be a core topic of your artistic research. What have you learned from that, so far?

Short-term media like Twitter and hourly news created an impression of a world out of control, with democracy in peril and an overall outlook of doom. But if we look at developments concerning the world from a long-term perspective — the only sense-making way — almost any aspect concerning humanity seems to get better. Fewer people go hungry, fewer people die in wars and natural disasters, more people live in democracies — and live much longer lives — than ever before. 200 years ago, 9 out of 10 people could neither read nor write, now it is just 1 out of 10 (…) We created a lot of visualizations. The goal behind these visualizations is that viewers might want to place them into their living rooms, as reminders that the latest tweets are just tiny blips in an overall rather healthy environment. Doing that they retain functionality, which is why they are pieces of design, not art. You could call them propaganda for the living room.

You’ll be coming to Belgium on October 24th to give a talk called “This will be boring” at KIKK Festival. What are the key topics that you’ll be exploring then?

We all find negativity much more fascinating than positive news. As my talk is very optimistic, there is a danger of it not being very interesting. There are a number of reasons for this: for one, the amygdala — a small, almond-shaped mass in the central brain — compounds the problem, transporting negative messages much faster than positive ones in order to keep us safe. The brains of our prehistoric ancestors required a shortcut for negative news — it was extremely important to detect that lion quickly, as the alternative was death. The brain never developed a similar timesaver for positive messages. If the banana was missed, there might be another one around the corner. Today, we’re all living much safer lives, and our lives would be better informed if we were more receptive to positive news. I don’t believe the people running our media outlets to be evil; they simply leverage our naturally heightened interest in drama and negative messaging. Most attempts to create a positive news site have failed immediately. Sentiment mining is a research method in which you review the news for frequently used words like “good,” “terrible,” and “horrific,” tallying each use and its context. This research validates my gut feeling, confirming that the increasing negativity of the news over the past few decades is scientifically provable. And also, we all simply find drama more fascinating. While working on The Happy Film, a documentary about my own happiness, our team went through the considerable trouble of sending the entire film team from New York to Bregenz to interview my siblings. I purposefully did not take part in these interviews, as I wanted my brothers and sisters to have a chance to speak freely about all of the awful things I must have done growing up. When I checked the footage weeks later, they had all talked only about positive events. This was incredibly boring. We wound up using not a single frame.

What are your thoughts on KIKK Festival? What can an event of that type bring to culture and society?

I’ve talked there before and found the exchange with other designers truly up-lifting. A number of conference organizers thought during the pandemic that we might be able to get together over zoom in the future, which proved to be not true: we really want to meet up in person.

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