Stefan Sagmeister got famous by designing album covers for musicians like Jay Z, Lou Reed, and the Rolling Stones.
Then he started writing books and became one of the most prolific design authors out there.
Transcript
Table of Contents
[00:55] Coming up with original ideas
[04:13] Why Stefan writes diaries
[10:02] How typography improves content
[14:17] The value of making things by hand
[18:03] Beauty changes how we behave
[21:10] Turning music into album covers
[25:24] How to refine taste and style
[38:46] Beauty vs function
[42:23] “Everyone who is honest, is interesting”
[48:36] Taking sabbaticals to fuel ideas
[49:29] “Trying to look good limits my creativity”
[54:05] Writing for other vs yourself
[58:40] How to break the same-ification of design
[01:02:07] Weekly ratings to track growth
[01:04:24] What building has moved Stefan most?
David Perell:
Stefan Sagmeister is the author of six books and, honestly, one of the most influential designers in the world. I couldn’t believe it. He’s won multiple Grammy awards for his designs because he’s designed album covers for people like Jay-Z and David Byrne, The Rolling Stones.
But he’s a writer. What does he write about? Well, design, beauty, how to find good ideas. And you’ll notice when you pick up one of his books that the form, the style, the vibe, the typography is every bit as important as the content. This is really about design, beauty, and why our world looks the way it does.
This conversation starts with a strategy for finding good ideas. Tell me about this Edward De Bono method of when you’re starting to think of some new idea and you’re looking for a venturing off point, you start off with a very random point of departure.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Let’s say I have to design a glass. Yeah. My usual or normal way would be, okay, I look at the existing glasses, I try them out, I see what everybody else has done, and I look at the history of glasses. Starting with that, I probably would design a glass that’s very similar to the existing glasses.
Now, if I want to design a glass that’s new, my chance of designing something new is better if I don’t start with a glass, but with something random. Let’s say I start designing with your sock because I just see them.
Okay, so then we already have: Do we have fabric around the glass? Do we have something that is maybe elastic? Is there a possibility for a drinking container that’s actually elastic? Is there something that could be nice that is hard here, but can we make something that is hard here but soft here? So when I put it down, it doesn’t make the noise, but it kind of stands and it could stand in all things.
Not even bad. Took me 10 seconds. That was pretty good.
I think we could possibly prototype this, specifically now where we can injection mold different materials together, so that we have a hard thing up here and a soft, let’s say if we do it out of some sort of artificial material. This could be injection molded so that this thing is much, much, much more rubbery, and this thing is super, super hard, much more plasticky so that when we put it down, it can stand in all directions. Maybe for camping, this could be a very nice thing. So specifically, if you put it down on an uneven ground, like, you know, on grassy or there’s stones, that this just takes on the form. You’re getting somewhere.
Would have never thought it if I wouldn’t have started with your sock. Never.
David Perell:
That’s a good answer.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Of course, De Bono explains why this works, because our brain is lazy and it’s very difficult for the brain. It’s very energy heavy for the brain to think, so it doesn’t want to think.
So when we are just looking at other glasses, those are the synapses that it already has a connection, doesn’t have to make a new one. When I force it to start with your sock, it has to make new connections. Now suddenly, it has to think. It cannot just go, at the end we’ll wind up with a glass.
The end result, the end ways, but I forced the brain to go through some other things and form a new synapse or a semi-new synapse. That’s also the reason why so many designers constantly repeat themselves, because that’s the strongest connection between the synapses. It’s like when they try to do something new, they’re doing something that they did two years ago because that synapse in their brain is already connected.
David Perell:
One of the reasons I’m really excited to talk to you is that you’ve built such a coherent, cohesive worldview. And I feel like a lot of that has been born out of your practice of writing diaries.
Stefan Sagmeister:
You are correct.
I started writing diaries, as many young people do, at like 10 or 12. I think I found them really to be helpful.
Strangely, once I switched to doing them on the computer because my handwriting was so sloppy, specifically in the most interesting times when I’m doing really badly or doing really well, I could never read it again. So it was never something that I could recheck, and I found the rechecking super interesting.
Sometimes there is a situation where I wanted to change something in my life eight years ago, and I still haven’t changed it. I’m like, wow, I already wanted to do something about this eight years ago, and I’m still suffering on this particular issue.
Then I think as design was more close to my heart, the diary writing by itself really influenced the design. Then in the design world, the diary started to impact what we were doing significantly.
There was a time after the first sabbatical where we got clients in the studio that had open briefs, meaning there was a client in France, a billboard company. They had billboards, and they said, “Do something, whatever.” So I could have taken a photo of this water glass, and they actually would have run it literally. It was open.
This turned out to be super difficult for me because I was not used to work that way, with zero restraints. When it came to what should we do, I went back into the diary, and there was a list that said, “Things I’ve learned in my life so far.”
David Perell:
Oh, wow.
Stefan Sagmeister:
It had like 15 things on it. I thought, well, I’ll pick one of those, and I’ll make very complicated typography out of it. Because at least I know, because I wrote it for myself in the diary, I know this to be true for me.
David Perell:
Tell me about the process of writing the diary because you have such refined views about many of the core things that would go through a designer’s head about beauty, about utility, about function, about the world that we live in.
The context here is when you go on your website, there’s a whole answers page, and there’s probably answers to 100 different questions that you’ve really thought through. I’m very curious about the process of how you arrived at such clean thinking, because I know that clean thinking always has a messy process that leads up to it.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Sometimes in the design world, but very heavily in the art world, there is this notion of speaking in tongues, meaning in outspeak. You know, I sometimes make, you know, like, I take the pictures of the entry text in an exhibition.
David Perell:
Yeah, academia is the same way.
Stefan Sagmeister:
That’s so ridiculous. I mean, I probably have 100 picture of is among the most important artists working today.
That’s the first sentence, and then it goes on. I’m now versed well enough in outspeak that I can translate it.
We have an exhibition going on right now at a museum called Mas in Mexico. The entry text is in outspeak and is crossed out. Then in handwriting, it’s the same text.
David Perell:
I love that.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Three sentences, exactly the same content: Here it’s 15 sentences in outspeak, and here it’s in four sentences in very clear speak.
And I can tell you, for example, in the beauty show, in the exhibition on beauty, I worked my ass off to make the text as short and as precise as possible. Because I know if you’re standing in a museum, you don’t want to read 15 sentences; you might do two. You want to get them immediately because there is so much stuff in museums that are not gettable or where people kind of feel stupid, which I think is a terrible thing to do to a person in any way.
But the result was that I should have kept one or two in outspeak. I later on heard an interview of an astronomer and he said he worked so hard to make his first book very transparent, and then some people, specifically colleagues, thought that it was for children.
So now he always includes at least one chapter that’s quite opaque so that people appreciate the clarity more.
David Perell:
One of the things that you have a keen understanding of is how typography can enhance content. And when I look through your work, it’s like a zoo of typography. It’s all these different forms from, I didn’t know that style existed, that that shape existed.
Most people think of typography as going on and looking at 74,000 different fonts, and then choosing one. A lot of your typography is stuff that you literally hand-drew and created yourself. I’m curious to hear about how you think of the relationship between the form of the type and the content of it.
Stefan Sagmeister:
I came of age and became a designer when modernism was maybe 60, 70 years old, let’s say starting at 1900, 1910 and then going on.
By that point, it has sort of become the dialect of the corporate world, and there’s that unbelievably boring and machine-made and cold thing that I didn’t feel was good in communicating anything.
So, very early in the studio, we tried to make things very obviously human-made, from an idea that if you call a company and you get an answering machine, it’s just not as nice as if you get a human being. I thought the same would be true online and in print. If you’re making something that very clearly has been made by a human, it’s just going to be already a little bit more interesting than almost all work that came out of modernism that in 1910 was very proud to be machine-made. It’s a sitting machine, it’s a place, it’s a machine for living.
In 1910 it was super interesting because you had to get rid of all that crap from the 19th century, all of that ornamental bullshit.
David Perell:
Thinking of the Bauhaus.
Stefan Sagmeister:
By the 1980s, when I came of age, this was super boring. This has run its course.
You still had these most conservative of designers and architects clinging to that crap. My view is out of pure laziness because they all thought functionality, that’s where it’s at, but functionality is so unbelievably easy. If I have to set typography so that it’s good, well readable, I can do thousands of it in an afternoon. It’s super easy once you know the rules. Give me a break.
The same is true for a chair. If I have to design a chair that all it has to be is functional, reasonably comfortable, I can do 50 of them in an afternoon. It’s nothing because you know the ideal sitting height and ideal angles and the materials, and then that’s that.
But if you need to design a chair that is functional, but also beautiful, and makes sense in 2025, this is one of the biggest design problems in the world because now suddenly you’re fighting 5,000 years of chair history. This is a completely different deal. All these lazy functionalists just say, “All I need to do is make it ergonomically fine.” It’s just stupidity and laziness.
David Perell:
A lot of what you did with typography was actually make things by hand. It got me thinking. It does take some skill, but it would be really interesting for authors to think about designing their book covers by hand. It’s just not something that people do.
I have a friend in town; he runs a restaurant called Jeans, and he just designed the logo by doing a bunch of handwritten drawings. He took the handwriting and put that into the computer. To say that he designed his own fonts is overstating the case, but he was able to make that digital.
In this world, especially with AI, where things are going to become more machine, computerized, synthetic, whatever it is, it just seems like having strategies to communicate, “Hey, this is handmade. This was made with care by a human being,” is an important thing to consider.
Stefan Sagmeister:
And I think it goes beyond the form. There was a time when handwriting became so ubiquitous that you had IBM ads being in Crixel Fraxel headlines. I think the form is one thing, but then also the content—the way you communicate, the way you say, or the way you design the book cover—can be that clearly this is a crafted piece. That could be that could go all the way, which is possible. That there really is something handmade on the cover, which is possible if you figure out the system and how to get that done.
Ultimately, I think in all of this, in this entire world, be it’s the logo for your friend’s restaurant or the book cover, is we feel as viewers if something has been done with love and care.
Then we are quite generous. I recently stayed a hotel in Milano, in Italy, which was really not my style. It was kitschy, it had butterflies. It was really not my thing, but I felt pretty comfortable there anyway. I probably wouldn’t if I would stay there a month, but for a weekend it was totally fine because the person who put this together, the organization who put this hotel together, they did it with love and care. There was clearly they felt that this was something that was beautiful. That was good. That was good enough for me, even though I would never decorate my place in that way.
But I think we all don’t go on holiday in the places where you have discount furniture stores, gas stations, and fast food places. You very rarely see a hotel in those places. You might see a motel because there’s also a factory there that needs something. But you very rarely see a hotel there because we go there if we need our cars gassed up, or we need cheap furniture, but we will not want to stay longer out of our free will there because these places have been created without love and care. Somebody needed a discount furniture store. Well, they said, well, let’s put a box there, put our logo on it and that’s good enough.
David Perell:
They’ve been created for convenience and efficiency and utility without any regard for the aesthetics. Even deeper, one of the questions that you answer on your page is basically to the effect of does beauty matter? And you basically say of course it does. People feel better, they feel different in beautiful places. But it’s this weird modern moment that we’re in right now where we’ve come to doubt that very obvious and intuitive truth.
Stefan Sagmeister:
I would say it goes even beyond that. They feel better and they behave better.
David Perell:
Oh really?
Stefan Sagmeister:
Yes. We are now on 26th Street, a couple of blocks away from the High Line. If you look at the High Line, you almost never see a piece of paper, a cup, thrown away on the High Line. Basically never.
David Perell:
True.
Stefan Sagmeister:
You leave the High Line, you go into the meatpacking district. It’s everywhere in the gutter. It’s all over the place. I’ll tell you this.
David Perell:
When I was in college, I went to a beautiful school called Elon University. And you wouldn’t dare litter if you were walking. If you littered and someone saw that you threw down a Tootsie Roll wrapper or something like that, you would get the eyes of Sauron on you from all the other students. There was just a self-policing that was embedded in the culture because of how beautiful it was.
Stefan Sagmeister:
I can tell you that if I’m at a mall here and in a similar mall in Europe, I would say people behave very similarly. If I am at an airport here and at an airport in Europe, people behave much better in Europe.
And the reason is the shitty architecture. I mean, it really is. There should have been a study, and I’m sure they didn’t, but I would have loved to see a study of aggressive behavior at Laguardia five years ago and now. I bet you anything that people calm down to the remodel. Yes, 100%.
David Perell:
Same thing with Grand Central and Penn Station. I thought it was so interesting what you said about how the average photo at Penn Station had a negative vibe to it, whereas the average photo at Grand Central a positive one.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, the average, it was at an institute in Boston, did a very—it’s actually live. You can look at it all the time. They did a big study on Twitter or X now that basically is geographically based, and they can measure if a tweet is positive or negative.
David Perell:
The sentiment.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Yeah. And then color the map of Manhattan in green, but it’s more positive than negative, and red when it’s more negative than positive. And Grand Central is always green 24 hours a day, and Penn Station is always red 24 hours a day.
David Perell:
Tell me about how you went from listening to the emotional tenor of a song to translating that into visuals. I mean, you’re doing this for Brian Eno, David Byrne, Talking Heads, the Rolling Stones. How did you go about that process?
Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, I think you basically already mentioned it. That was the interesting part. You’re picking something.
If I go a second back, we usually were asked by the band to design the cover when, during, while they were in the studio. And so I would go to the studio. Depending on how famous the band is, they would give me 10 songs, half-finished, not finished. When it became to bigger people like Jay-Z or the Stones, they wouldn’t give you the songs. You had to listen to them while you were there because they were afraid of leaks and things like that.
But in general, you listen to the songs. Almost always, we could get some songs, and we played that in the studio and tried to talk to the band only about why they’re making a new album, where does it come from, what they think it is about, and not about the cover at all. Because I felt that that translation of that sort of emotion in the music into something that we love, the fact that music by design is not visual, and translating that into a visual is still, I think, a super interesting endeavor.
And that was the job, translating this emotion. And in some cases, if the band had a lot of history, like the Stones, also that whole brouhaha of information and baggage into something that would work. And then, of course, also listen to what the band thought about in general. In the case of the Stones, it was very commercially oriented. Mick Jagger wanted something that looked good embroidered on a baseball cap, because the Stones actually make more money with merch than they do with their music.
David Perell:
Right. Is there a story from one of those album covers that really stands out to you?
Stefan Sagmeister:
If we stick with the Stones, one of my favorite moments was when I met Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts in Los Angeles.
I asked Jagger what his favorite Stones covers would be, and he said, “Excellent, Main Street, Some Girls, and Sticky Fingers.” I said, “Well, that’s fantastic! These are my favorite three Stones covers. I would have said Sticky Fingers, Some Girls, and Exile on Main Street.”
Then I saw Charlie Watts leaning over to Jagger and asking what “songs” Sticky Fingers was.
David Perell:
He didn’t know?
Stefan Sagmeister:
He had no idea. Jagger explained to him, “You know, it’s the one with the zipper, it’s the one that Andy did,” Andy, of course, being Andy Warhol.
To me, that was so amazing: that every Stones fan would know Sticky Fingers, but somebody in the band, who’s been in that band forever, would be so incredibly uninterested in anything but the drumming or the core music that he wouldn’t be aware of it. That was amazing, because, for many people, including me, Sticky Fingers is one of the best covers of all time.
David Perell:
How do you go about refining your visual palette and sense of taste?
Stefan Sagmeister:
You’re doing more, and you’re seeing more. I think our taste, including our view on beauty, depends very much on how much we’ve seen already, and obviously the context we’ve seen it in and how we feel when we’re seeing it.
That’s also a big problem between an audience, a curator, and a critic, because an audience, by definition, will have seen much less than the critic, so their tastes can be very, very different. It becomes a huge problem when it comes to public art, which, by definition, because it’s called public art, should be for the public.
Critics hate public art. If you listen to Jerry Saltz, he says that 99.9% of all public art is crap. From a critic’s point of view, that’s very much likely true because you’ve seen so much that everything looks lame to you.
But if you’re working nine-to-five and you take the subway and see some mural on the subway wall, you probably want it to be pretty. You’ll definitely have a very different point of view of that mural wall than if you are thinking and dealing with art sixteen hours a day.
In that way, it’s almost irrelevant what the critic thinks about public art, because it really is for the public.
I think I’m thinking that way because I’m coming from design. In design, it is paramount. It’s in the center of the profession that you take the public seriously. Well, in art, it’s very different. I’ve talked to many artists who couldn’t give a shit about the public, which becomes difficult and sometimes odd if you then exhibit in a very popular museum like MoMA, where you have a gigantic percentage of the audience being tourists that might visit a museum every three years and go into that place kind of not understanding anything.
At least they can see Starry Sky by Van Gogh or a couple of others, so they probably get at least a little bit of fulfillment. There is an odd thing going on where you have a significant percentage of the audience not being talked to, not being communicated with.
David Perell:
What comes to mind, and this is a slight diversion from what you’re saying, is where things can frankly be over-intellectualized to the point where the intellect can see something as good that is actually the opposite of maybe what your intuitive sense thinks is really good. You know, we were joking at dinner the other night that the ugliest building on many college campuses is the architecture building.
And if you look at the preferences that architects have versus the preferences of ordinary people, they’re exactly the opposite. You know, and you see the same thing in, we were talking about bad writing earlier. You see the same thing where in order to fit into some club, people will spice up, fluff up their writing in some sort of fancy schmancy way, but no, people don’t want that. And because of that, I think it’s important to have some sort of hall of heroes in your head of people who are popular and good, popular and good.
Stefan Sagmeister:
I think that’s also by far the hardest thing to do.
David Perell:
Popular and good.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Yeah, like if you can make a film, if you can write a book, if you can do anything that is really good, but it actually talks to a mass audience, that’s my highest bar. That’s by far the most difficult thing to do.
There’s people out there who think that you’re selling out when you do that. But no, I think that there’s examples in all of that. I mean, there’s examples in books, there’s examples in movies that actually were able to achieve that.
David Perell:
There are totally people who do sell out in order to reach the mass market for sure. But the problem is, if you think that everyone who’s successful is just a sellout, then what does that mean? If you become successful, are you going to be like, well, I sold out? No, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not the way it always works.
I think that a lot of this just comes down to people over intellectualizing, especially architects, especially writers.
Stefan Sagmeister:
You have that same gap that we just talked about that if you’re an architect, and specifically if you’re a good architect, you are breathing this 16 hours a day. And of course, your taste, what you feel is beautiful, is very different from somebody who doesn’t think about architecture at all.
There was a case maybe a year, maybe two years ago where you had 10 experts or a dozen experts in the New York Times electing their, whatever it was, 20 or 50 favorite buildings. Oh my God, you should have seen the comments afterwards. It was like everybody was like, you guys are nuts. This is all shit. This is terrible.
It was very odd because the majority of these buildings were important boxes. You know, it was all rectangular, boxy by the Bauhausy buildings. Of course, many of them early, many of them were quite new when they were done, but the audience did not appreciate that at all.
I’d say it was very, there was almost no living architect among them. I also felt it was kind of pissy. You know, like nobody wanted to have a colleague on the list. It was safer to have the dead people on there. Yeah, it was not like I also didn’t. I know more about architecture than I guess the usual commentary in the New York Times. But I also thought it was a little bit unfortunate.
David Perell:
Tell me more about that process of refining taste. You were talking about consuming a lot and basically having a broad palette, but what else have you done?
Stefan Sagmeister:
It comes to a taste of beauty. I think a lot of it is just the desire to make it beautiful. But I would say between the 1950s and the year 2000, roughly, there was a concentration on functionalism that completely left beauty aside.
When I studied, which was in the ‘80s in art school, you couldn’t mention beauty. You would be laughed out of the classroom. You were thought of as either conservative or surface-related, or maybe totally commercial like in the beauty industry, or possibly a Nazi.
In any case, if you talked about beauty in the ‘80s in my art school, you were not considered a serious person, because it was not something that a serious person would waste their time on.
So there was no thought given to making it beautiful. It was just not something that was in the air, definitely not in design, but also in architecture, definitely in art. It was a term non grata, for sure.
I think we are in the process now of that changing, where very fantastic architects like Herzog and Temeron or a good number of others, top architects, very openly talk about the need and the desire for beauty.
David Perell:
What I took from that is this: When you did your beauty show, the main sentence was basically this: “Beauty is a combination of shape, form, color, composition, material, and texture to please the aesthetic senses, especially the site.”
Part of what you’re doing when you look at the world is you’re looking at what is the shape of this? What is the form, what is the color, the composition, the material, and the texture? What are all those things?
You’re looking at every single part and then asking, “How do I elevate that?”
Enzo Ferrari was once asked, “How did you make such a beautiful car?” And he said something to the effect of, “I just looked at a normal car and at every single thing I saw, I asked, how do I make this thing better?”
Stefan Sagmeister:
It would be exactly the same technique, or the same sort of thinking. Exactly the same.
David Perell:
It’s that constant questioning. I think that’s a very important felt sense that one needs to have whenever they work on a project: When you have just tweaked a thousand things to make them better, it’s the ensemble of all of those things that makes the feng shui, or whatever it is, perfect, or at least really of quality.
I think that what you don’t get a sense of until you make something is that excellence is really just the byproduct of 10,000 things that are thought of consciously and tweaked and refined.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Yeah, 100%. You just made a film, so that’s at the very meaning there. This is truer than almost anywhere else. You have 10,000 things that need tweaking.
David Perell:
Maybe 100,000 in a film. I notice so many designers, so many creatives, they just end up getting in a rut where they become a parody of themselves.
Stefan Sagmeister:
I think that’s very much that. When I was very young, I only liked the changers and I never liked the stay-the-samers.
I preferred the Beatles over the Stones. I preferred Andy Warhol over Roy Lichtenstein. I preferred David Bowie over Bob Dylan. You get the idea.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Stefan Sagmeister:
As I got older, I think I appreciated some of the steady-state aimers also. I actually quite like the Bob Dylan steady-state in a more narrow way, because he could really go deeper there.
It’s very obvious to me as James Turrell, meaning he basically not only stayed the same, but he’s doing some ideas over and over again, like his skyscape, you know, the space with the square, square or oval or round hole in the ceiling. He’s done dozens of them and they become better and better and better.
To the point where I don’t even… I now look, if a museum has a skyspace, I look at the date. If it’s too old, I don’t even go and see it, because the new ones are so much better than the old ones. And I’m so glad that he stuck with it, that he was willing as a person to just make it 2%, 5% better every single time he does a new one.
David Perell:
Yeah, I always think of Japanese craftsmanship. That’s just remarkable about the Japanese, is their persistence. After 40 years of making knives, we’re going to do another decade and another decade and another decade, and it’s just refining that practice. Same thing with sushi over and over and over.
Stefan Sagmeister:
You see it in those Edo temples that are… basically, the whole idea is that it’s been rebuilt every 20 years so that every generation can learn how to rebuild it.
There’s Edo temples, meaning it’s whatever, 800 years old, but of course, it was rebuilt dozens and dozens of times. The whole design idea is that it’s being redone all the time, and they’re planting the trees to rebuild it in 40 years from now.
David Perell:
Let’s talk about the relationship between beauty and function, because a lot of people see them as kind of opposites, but you have strongly rejected that.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Beauty is a function in itself. Beauty makes things work much better.
That actually was what brought us in the studio to beauty, because we noticed that whenever we really… whenever we did a project where we took the form very seriously, that project seemed to work much better. When I looked into it, that really became clear.
David Perell:
What are examples of that?
Stefan Sagmeister:
I think I have one right here: a bag. This bag is a new bag, but I’ve just had that remade in Mexico, but I’ve had basically the same bag. I bought the same bag 35 years ago, and I’ve had it for 35 years.
I had it repaired maybe every five years because I liked it. It doesn’t really matter if other people think… many people think it’s beautiful, but probably not everybody, but I thought it was beautiful, which meant that I had it repaired all the time, which made this much, much, much, much more sustainably proper than you know, those Yota bags or those cotton bags that you get under the guise of sustainability.
My favorite example would be the Pantheon in Rome, the longest, all the time having been used building in the world, 2000 years old, never was broken down because every culture that occupied it thought it was beautiful and didn’t want to get rid of it. That is the single most sustainable building in the world, much more sustainable than any bamboo hut or any of those places that we now think of as being sustainable.
David Perell:
It’s crazy to me that the sustainability movement hasn’t co opted beauty as their friend.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Very, very odd where so much of the sustainability world, meaning those ugly solar panels on houses very often, but you not so much see that’s here, but we see it a lot in central Europe where houses have been, you know, have some added isolation that is just really dreadful.
I, of course, am a big friend of solar panels, but you need to create them with beauty in mind, and you have to install them with beauty in mind, and then it will be fantastic. I am sure that if you installed solar panels gorgeously on your roof, when it comes to resale value, that will reflect in that resale value if that whole thing is beautiful.
David Perell:
And the sun will be so excited to be next to the solar panels that more rays will come to you.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Sun is our friend for sure.
David Perell:
It’ll be, all the rays will be running there. I want to go through some of the lessons that you shared in your book, and I just want to get your quick take on why you’ve chosen these. The first one is that everyone who is honest is interesting.
Stefan Sagmeister:
That actually was not even my lesson. That came from a guy called Quentin Crisp, who came to visit my students, and he told the students that he used to say everybody’s interesting. And then, a journalist said, “Well, you’re wrong, like, so many are so boring.” He said, “Well, everybody who is honest is interesting.”
That hit me like a lightning bolt because as a designer, obviously, as a writer, you want to be interesting. I mean, that’s the core of it. I thought, wow, this is so fantastic. All you have to do is being honest. It will be automatically interesting.
In many ways, it’s easier to be honest than to have a great, than to sit down and needing to have a great idea. But the honesty is, of course, also true in writing, obviously. We feel it.
I spent a good amount of time at conferences speaking, and I hear other speakers, you feel it in a second.
David Perell:
In a second.
Stefan Sagmeister:
If the person who speaks is not honest about it, if it’s just whatever cliche, or if it’s something that he picked up, or if it doesn’t come from the heart, the audience knows immediately.
David Perell:
Immediately. My friend Jeremy has a great line. He says, the solution to writer’s block is just to be more honest.
I think that that’s very often the case, that a lot of times when people don’t know what to say, don’t know what to create, they’re not actually tapping into what they believe to be true. There’s a social filter. Either somebody is, they have the filter of, what am I supposed to say? Or if I say this, somebody else won’t like me. And so the lack of honesty just becomes like muck in the water stream, and the water just can’t move.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Yeah, 100%. Couldn’t agree more.
David Perell:
Next one, if I want to explore a new direction professionally, it is helpful to try it out for myself first.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Trying experimenting for myself lowers the hurdles because I can find my sea feet while the stakes are very low. I’m more free to try this, try that, because if nothing comes out at the end of the day, I might be a bit frustrated, but okay, so what?
I think it’s sort of like a way to get me through times when my level of guts are not so high, just to experiment for myself. Then when I have, if something worked, then it’s much easier to do it on the bigger stage and on the big, yeah, 100%.
David Perell:
That seems to be a huge theme for your career and how you structure life, is to make room for experimentation. I have never met someone who, like you, consciously said, I’m going to do a full year on sabbatical every seven years.
Stefan Sagmeister:
It turned out to be a very good decision.
David Perell:
This was the year 2000, no, it was 99, I think it was, because it was the dot com boom.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Exactly. Everybody made a lot of money. It felt very unprofessional to close the studio now that it was running, now that it was finally happening. We had good clients and yeah, that was scary for me.
In the year, I literally did not produce anything. I just did ideas. So at the end of the year, I had a full sketchbook. I had a large sketchbook. It was filled with stuff. I had a more carefully written diary because I had more time. The diary was longer, much more often. I could probably get into thoughts a little deeper.
At the end of the year, I was happy to go back into a more regular studio environment. Ultimately, this whole series of things I’ve learned in my life so far that became exhibitions and books came out of that because that was part of the diary of that year.
Then the second sabbatical was super easy, meaning that the first one had so clearly a big impact on the studio. Not just on the quality of the work of the studio, but also of how I felt in the studio. Because I could get rid of, in the first seven years that when it was super busy, I had all sorts of thoughts of, oh, my God, I would love to do this if I would only have the time.
Some of that stuff I really loved to do when I had the time. Some of that stuff, I was delusional. I didn’t want to do that at all, including, for example, reading, which was a huge surprise to me.
I always thought, my God, if I would only have more time, I would read so much more. Didn’t at all.
I’m just coming back from a sabbatical where the first four months in Madrid and then in Mexico, in Guadalajara. I probably read 20, 25 books, which is what I read in the busy, normal times. So that didn’t increase whatsoever, but many other things, of course, I did have time for.
David Perell:
Well, it seems like what you do is you set up a hierarchy of what you want to learn when you go on sabbatical. You say, I want to learn this, this, this. And then you basically block out your Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, and you say, I’m going to have time for this, I’m going to have time for this, I’m going to have time for this.
My understanding is you did not do that the first time. The first time it didn’t work super well. So you’re like, all right, this is what I need to do. This is what I need to do. Okay, if I can do this, then the sabbatical will be good.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Yeah. The first time I thought I should have no plan whatsoever, and that didn’t work out. I was just busy and frustrated that I didn’t really create anything.
So I needed the plan. By now, I know that I need the plan literally only for maybe the first two or three months to really get it going. By month three, I have so many projects running that I don’t need to have any plan anymore. Then they are just running.
David Perell:
Tell me about this one: “Trying to look good limits my life.”
Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, that harks back to this. I think it’s also relative in there with honesty. This idea that I always have to look the way that people will like me and do things that are likable, that is a limitation.
That’s a problem that I think that I probably have more so than other people.
David Perell:
Me, too. Me, too. Me, too.
Stefan Sagmeister:
I definitely want to be liked, definitely to a fault. I think my life would be richer without having to necessarily make other people’s life poorer if I would sometimes care less about being liked.
David Perell:
I always catch myself daydreaming about if I do this thing, then this person will approve, think highly of me. I’m like, dude, what?
Are you really going to make that the telos of your life and all the things that it blocks me from doing and saying and standing up for? Not proud of it.
“Obsessions make my life worse and my work better.”
Stefan Sagmeister:
I think I’m already an obsessive personality. I fall easily for addictions.
I had to stop drinking alcohol, and I definitely stopped smoking cigarettes. First cigarettes, and then for a while in sabbaticals, I said, well, it’s sabbatical. I’m allowed to smoke cigars. The last, not in this sabbatical, but that was still the case in the sabbatical eight years ago.
And first day, two cigars, second day, 12.
David Perell:
You did 12 cigars in a day?
Stefan Sagmeister:
And at the end of the sabbatical, I was inhaling them. So very clearly unsupportable, unsustainable, and of course, I had to stop.
But in the professional life, in work, it’s extremely helpful because if you’re obsessive about a certain piece and you obsessively try to make it better, try to make it more beautiful, try to push it to the point where you can’t push it anymore, where you think, okay, this is right now, my level of pushification. This is where I can go. I don’t know now where to go. I think if you can go there, that often is a good piece.
David Perell:
Man, I love that word, pushification. That is such a good word. I know exactly what you mean by that.
So this is my interpretation of what you’re saying. When you’re at a certain point in your life, there’s a limit of talent and taste that you have. And when you do work that you’re proud of, you’ve pushed to that limit. It’s not the best that you can do over the course of your life.
What ends up happening, which is great, is you look back at where you had pushified in the past. You’re like, dude, I could have done so much better. But in every moment, I think that the goal of whatever project you’re working on is to pushify as much as you can.
And I love that word, which I think you’ve completely made up, because it implies a level of progress over time while also giving yourself some grace to say at that moment in time, that was as good as I could do. While also giving yourself some motivation to really pushify to the utter horizon of what you’re capable of.
Stefan Sagmeister:
And that’s really all you can do. There might, of course, be at the same time other people who could push much further, 100%, totally possible.
And if I push to the point where I can’t anymore, I’m lost. I think this is where I am right now. There’s always other people who like it. I think I’m enough within the mainstream that this sort of relatability is there.
David Perell:
How much when you’re designing, when you’re writing, do you think about you yourself as the creator? I’m going to focus on my taste versus the taste, the wishes, the desires, the consumer, the audience.
Stefan Sagmeister:
It depends. Let’s say, when we did album covers, I found it my responsibility to serve the world of that band.
So I would say, if I did a cover for Lou Reed and the Lou Reed fan base thinks this is a shit cover, you failed, even if I felt it was a very good cover.
Because I do think that within the world of design, there has to be that sort of functionality. We haven’t done any commercial work in years, and so a lot of the stuff that we’re doing now is design. But it’s distributed in museums, in galleries.
There is sort of a client, because the gallery or the museum, you know, they sometimes have a sale, they sometimes have a thing, but of course it’s not a commercial client and it’s much wider.
And there I feel it’s also like it runs under my name, like it says on the museum wall, Stefan Sagmeister. Now it says the exhibition that we are running right now is called “Finally Something Good”.
And like, when we create the piece, I’m not thinking to serving a community necessarily. But I still want, and this is by its design and not art, I still see the exhibition has to have a functionality, as in, I want the people to have a different view of the world after the exhibition than they had before the exhibition.
David Perell:
What do you make of the homogeneity that has infected the design world? You talk about a font where you can tell if something’s a Swiss typeface or a Norwegian typeface. A poster, you can tell if something’s a French poster or an Italian poster going back, but now there’s this homogeneity.
My first question is, do you think that will continue? And second of all, how do you break from that?
Stefan Sagmeister:
War is a good place.
David Perell:
Let’s go to war, baby.
Stefan Sagmeister:
I can tell you we had two exhibitions in Ukraine and nowhere else have I seen so much designs rooted in their own history because they are attacked.
David Perell:
Oh, interesting. So it’s like the tree goes deeper into its roots once there’s like heavy.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Winds, you know, they are in danger of losing their identity, because if they would become part of Russian of Russia, of course it would all be Russian. You know, obviously they would even forbid the language. It would all be like the whole country has to speak Russian.
Meaning, the Russians did that already, of course, when they took Ukraine after World War II. They already, you know, got rid of the intellectuals, had everybody speak Russian, but of course that will return.
And so there is an incredible amount of new publishers that only publish in Ukrainian. There is an incredible amount of design stores where everything is contemporary, but everything has Ukrainian roots, Ukrainian stories, Ukrainian patterns. It’s done very, very well.
If we go back to the whole world, I 100% agree with you and I think it’s a huge problem.
I think that’s one of the real fantastic advantages that came through globalization lifted so many people worldwide out of poverty. Incredible.
One of the real downsides is the sameification of the world that you cannot tell in most cases what was done in London or in Helsinki or in Johannesburg.
David Perell:
So as you think of breaking out of this sameification of the world, it really is bad in the world of design because it’s not just the aesthetic semification, but it’s the templification of design.
You can just see it all the time. Working with designers drives me nuts because there is so much generic stuff that is thrown at me and even the innovative stuff is generic. Do you know what I mean?
Stefan Sagmeister:
Even the stupidity is everywhere. What happened to bathroom doors, like to shower doors? Every hotel you go to now, there’s no more door on the shower.
I recently talked to an architect about it. What the fuck? Why do you guys hate shower doors? He said, “Because they don’t look good on drawings.” Because on the drawing you have all these things there, and the drawing just looks so much cleaner without the door there. It’s that stupid. It’s literally that stupid.
For a while, I thought that the design hotel might be different. I had some hopes in the design hotel because one of the simplifications were the chain hotels that the Hilton or the Radisson needed to look the same everywhere because some people want to have exactly the same wherever they go.
It turned out that the design hotel, with some exceptions, look the same everywhere else. Maybe it has a little material gimmick. You know, the box that you go into in Kuala Lumpur has some bamboo outside, but it’s the same shit box that you also go into in Frankfurt, where it’s made out of stone. Architects and designers seem to have to think the same way pretty much anywhere. Specifically in an easy thing like a hotel where you can be really outrageous.
Even if you would get sick of it for three days, it would be fun to be in a space that is completely different and totally local and completely of that time. That doesn’t mean that you have to go nostalgic or anything, but it could. Wouldn’t it be great to be in Saigon and be in a room that’s totally Saigon? Like complete, like real Saigon, including its what that means politically, what that means historically, what that means to live in Saigon right now. Get the real taste of that.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Stefan Sagmeister:
As opposed to living in the same modernist thing and have the little stupid coffee shop downstairs that serves the same latte that I can get here on 23rd Street.
David Perell:
Yes. Same neon sign and all that.
Stefan Sagmeister:
All that nonsense. But first, coffee.
David Perell:
Exactly. The entire conversation, I’ve been thinking of this quote from Heinrich Hein. He goes to Amen’s Cathedral and he looks at this majestic cathedral and he says, “People in those old times had convictions. We moderns only have opinions, and it needs more than a mere opinion to build a Gothic cathedral.”
I want to end here. One of the coolest things that you do is that you grade yourself at the beginning of years, and then you pick a number of things that you want to improve, and then you give yourself a weekly rating on how you’re doing. Tell me about that.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Well, I was born three miles from the German border, so I’m a list maker. When we did the Happy Film, I had like eight lists running, all sorts of tests of how I felt, what this makes me feel, blah, blah, blah, but I still do this.
I think Benjamin Franklin had a very tight version of that list that tracks.
David Perell:
That’s the kind of thing you would do.
Stefan Sagmeister:
I used to do Good Intentions in the beginning of the year, but by January 5th, they’re kind of gone. I feel I need a reminder of what I want to do in my life, how I want to behave, what I want to be. Weekly turned out to be well for me.
I was actually in Mexico right now. There was a woman who I admire who had an app that did it daily, and I switched for three months or so to that, to her app, and it was too much for me. It was bothersome.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Weekly works. Weekly is fine. It takes me no time at all. Basically, I have a reminder in my now, of course, electronic calendar that I have to do the diary. I write the diary every Saturday morning. It comes up on my to-do list automatically.
So I do the diary, and I do my list. And it doesn’t mean that sometimes I have one thing that I get terrible marks for weeks. So it’s not that I really then have to, but it’s still a good reminder. No, I really that’s what I thought I shouldn’t do.
David Perell:
I have one more question. Out of all the buildings you’ve interacted with, designs you’ve seen, what is the one that has moved you the most that you recommend that we should engage with? Buildings or buildings, artistic projects? What is something that just really moved you?
Stefan Sagmeister:
Oh, my God, there’s so much. You got to pick one. So the one that maybe it resonates because we just talked about him, but I would say the Skyscape by James Turrell.
Or if you can pick a new one. You said you’re from Texas?
David Perell:
Yeah, there’s one at University of Austin.
Stefan Sagmeister:
There’s Rice, at Rice University. There’s a big one at Rice in Houston. There’s a fantastic one at Rice.
David Perell:
Really?
Stefan Sagmeister:
Yeah. Basically, it’s a space. It’s a room with a hole in the ceiling. But the way the hole in the ceiling is designed is so that it’s super, super thin at the edges, so you can’t really see it. So when you look up, let’s say if it’s a blue sky, you just see a blue space there. But the skyscapes are by far the best at sunrise and at sundown.
David Perell:
By far.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Even though you don’t see the sunrise and the sundown because you’re looking straight up into the sky, you see the subtle differences in the color, and those subtle differences as it changes are so gorgeous. And there’s such a beauty in there. I just had goosebumps talking about it.
So, for example, if you at Rice or at any of the many other skyscapes, and you stay long, and it’s basically already night, it never really goes black. It just goes into an extremely dark, dark, dark blue. But it’s the darkest blue you’ll ever, ever see, because you couldn’t print it, you couldn’t weave it, you couldn’t dye it, because it’s the universe that makes that blue.
There is a gorgeousness and a beauty in that blue that, for lack of a better explanation, you have to see to believe. It’s really something.
David Perell:
The thing that the skyscape did for me is it made me appreciate the way that colors are complementary, and then whatever the opposite of complementary is, that they when you see two colors together, it actually changes both of the colors.
As you watch a skyscape, you’ll have a few moments where maybe you’ll watch the way that orange engages with blue or pink engages with blue, and you’ll just see, oh, my goodness. There’s something psychedelic isn’t the right word, but there is something that is extrasensory or something about a skyscape where you’ve seen you’re so attuned to the relationships between color and form like you never are otherwise in real life.
Stefan Sagmeister:
And I think it puts everybody immediately into quiet mood. Talk about how beauty changes our behavior.
There’s a skyscape in Lech, in the place in Austria where we go skiing, and you can ski up to it. So people come with their boots on and they go in there, and they look up and they sit down.
Even though they are in their ski outfits and they have ski boots which are noisy when they come in, it’s clear. There’s no sign, don’t talk, don’t run, nothing. It totally demands that sort of behavior, and that’s great.
David Perell:
Well, thank you very much.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Was a pleasure. Thanks a lot.
David Perell:
Thanks for coming on.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Very much so.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Stefan Sagmeister:
Excellent.
