Sagmeister & Walsh

Sagmeister closes the studio for a year every seven years. The first sabbatical, taken during the dot-com boom, produced no products. It did produce a diary that became the studio's exhibitions and books on what he has learned, and it improved the work and the studio's working life.

With no plan, that first year left him busy and frustrated. Now he plans only the first two or three months, and by month three enough projects are running that he no longer needs the plan. He also found he did not read more with free time, still about 20 to 25 books.

How I Write▶ 49:05

An open brief is easier when you mine a private list of truths. After the first sabbatical a client gave him no constraints, which he found very hard. He picked one item from a diary list of about 15 things he had learned in his life so far and built complicated typography around it.

Because the list was written privately, he knew each line was true for him. That list grew into a series of exhibitions and books.

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A diary only pays off if you can reread it, so type it. His handwriting was unreadable exactly when life went very well or very badly, so he moved the diary to a computer. Rereading showed him a change he had wanted to make eight years earlier and still had not.

He writes it every Saturday morning, when it appears on his electronic to-do list, and rates himself weekly on things he chose to improve at the start of the year. A daily app lasted about three months and he did it sloppily; annual resolutions were gone by January 5th.

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Start from an unrelated object, not from the thing you are designing. Using Edward de Bono's method, Sagmeister designed a glass starting from a sock and in about 10 seconds got a glass hard at the top and soft at the base, so it stands on uneven camping ground. Studying existing glasses only leads to a similar glass.

It could be made by injection molding a hard and a soft material together. The result is still a glass; the method just forces the brain through "semi-new synapses."

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Designers repeat themselves because the oldest brain connection is strongest. When designers try something new, they often land on what they did two years ago. A forced starting point stops the lazy brain from taking its usual shortcut.

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Being honest is easier and more interesting than hunting for a great idea. Sagmeister took the line "everybody who is honest is interesting" from Grant Crisp, who said it to his students, and says it hit him like a lightning bolt. Audiences, like those watching conference speakers, feel within a second when something is cliché or borrowed.

He sees designing to be liked as a limitation, admits he has this problem more than most, and says his work would be richer if he cared less about it.

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Try a new direction privately before taking it to a bigger stage. Experimenting for yourself lowers the hurdles: you find your sea legs while stakes are low, and if nothing comes of it you are only a bit frustrated.

If it works, doing it publicly is much easier. Quote: "Trying, experimenting for myself lowers the hurdles."

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Function is easy; beauty is the hard part of design. He can design 50 merely functional chairs in an afternoon, but a chair that is also beautiful and fits today means fighting 5,000 years of chair history.

He treats beauty as shape, form, color, composition, material and texture, each one improvable, the way Enzo Ferrari reportedly asked of every part of a normal car how to make it better.

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Push each piece until you can't, then accept it as your level. Sagmeister calls this pushification: obsess over a piece until you cannot push further. That is your level at that moment, and such a piece is often a good one.

He says obsessiveness hurts his life but helps his work. Quote: "this is right now my level of pushification."

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Beautiful places make people behave better and things last longer. The High Line has almost no litter while the Meatpacking District beside it is full of it, and Grand Central reads positive on social media while Penn Station reads negative. The Pantheon survived 2,000 years because every culture that held it found it beautiful.

His 35-year-old bag was repaired every five years because he loved it. Places built only for convenience, like gas stations and furniture stores, are ones people leave as soon as they can.

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Visible care makes people forgive a style that isn't theirs. A kitschy Milan hotel full of butterflies was not his taste, yet he felt comfortable there because its makers clearly believed it was beautiful. Early on, the studio deliberately made work that was obviously human-made, against the cold, machine-made look of late modernism.

He suggests drawing a restaurant logo by hand before digitizing it, and says handmade signals matter more as AI makes things synthetic.

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Talk to the band about why the album exists, not about the cover. Sagmeister visited studios during recording, heard half-finished songs, and asked bands what the album was about. He saw the job as translating the music's emotion, and a band's history, into something visual.

For Jay-Z or the Stones he had to listen on site for fear of leaks. Mick Jagger wanted a design that would look good embroidered on a baseball cap, since the Stones earn more from merch than from music.

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A cover succeeds only if it serves the band's audience. If a Lou Reed cover is disliked by Lou Reed fans, he counts it a failure even if he thought it was good.

For his own exhibitions he instead aims for people to see the world differently afterward. Quote: "I found it my responsibility to serve the world of that band."

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Say it in a quarter of the sentences, because visitors read two. At the MASS museum in Mexico, a 15-sentence artspeak entry text is shown crossed out, with the same content handwritten beside it in four clear sentences.

For the beauty show he made every wall text "as short and as precise as possible" so nobody is made to feel stupid.

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Keep one opaque passage so clarity isn't mistaken for simplicity. An astronomer's colleagues took his very clear first book for a children's book, so he now adds one opaque chapter. Sagmeister says he should have kept one or two artspeak lines in his own show.

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Design should speak to ordinary people, not just experts. Critics have seen far more and judge differently; a commuter passing a subway mural simply wants it to be pretty. A New York Times panel of about a dozen experts picked mostly boxy Bauhaus-style buildings, and readers' comments were furious.

Sagmeister calls work that is both popular and good the hardest thing to make, and says it is not selling out. From the 1950s to about 2000, he says, functionalism made beauty taboo in design schools.

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