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TED.com.
Stefan Sagmeister shares happy design.
Graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister takes the audience on a whimsical journey through moments of his life that made him happy -- and notes how many of these moments have to do with good design.
http://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_shares_happy_design.html
About 15 years ago, I went to visit a friend in Hong Kong. And at the time I was very superstitious. So, upon landing -- this was still at the old Hong Kong airport that's Kai Tak, when it was smack in the middle of the city -- -- I thought: If I see something good, I'm going to have a great time here in my two weeks. And if I see something negative, I'm going to be miserable, indeed.
So the plane landed in between the buildings and got to a full stop in front of this little billboard.(Laughter) And I actually went to see some of the design companies in Hong Kong in my stay there.and it turned out that -- I just went to see, you know, what they are doing in Hong Kong.
But I actually walked away with a great job offer.And I flew back to Austria, packed my bags. And, another week later, I was again on my way to Hong Kong still superstitions and thinking: Well, if that "Winner" billboard is still up, I'm going to have a good time working here. (Laughter) But if it's gone, it's going to be really miserable and stressful. So it turned out that not only was the billboard still up but they had put this one right next to it. (Laughter) On the other hand, it also taught me where superstition gets me because I really had a terrible time in Hong Kong. (Laughter)
However, I did have a number of real moments of happiness in my life -- -- of, you know, I think what the conference brochure refers to as moments that take your breath away. And since I'm a big list maker, I actually listed them all. (Laughter) Now, you don't have to go through the trouble of reading them and I won't read them for you. I know that it's incredibly boring to hear about other people's happinesses. (Laughter)
What I did do, though is, I actually looked at them from a design standpoint and just eliminated all the ones that had nothing to do with design. And, very surprisingly, over half of them had, actually, something to do with design.
So there is, of course, two different possibilities.There's one from a consumer's point of view -- -- where I was happy while experiencing design. And I'll just give you one example. I had gotten my first Walkman. This is 1983. My brother had this great Yamaha motorcycle that he was willing to borrow to me freely. And The Police's "Synchronicity" cassette that had just been released and there was no helmet law in my hometown of Bregenz. So you could drive up into the mountains freely blasting The Police on the new Sony Walkman. (Laughter)And I remember it as a true moment of happiness.You know, of course, they are related to this combination of at least two of them being, you know, design objects. And, you know, there's a scale of happiness when you talk about in designbut the motorcycle incident would definitely be, you know situated somewhere here -- right in there between Delight and Bliss.
Now, there is the other part, from a designer's standpoint -- -- if you're happy while actually doing it. And one way to see how happy designers are when they're designing could be to look at the authors' photos on the back of their monographs?(Laughter) So, according to this, the Australians and the Japanese as well as the Mexicans are very happy. (Laughter) While, somewhat, the Spaniards...and, I think, particularly, the Swiss (Laughter)don't be doing all that well. (Laughter)
Last November, a museum opened in Tokyo, called The Mori Museum in a skyscraper, up on the 56th floor. And their inaugural exhibit was called "Happiness." And I went, very eagerly, to see it, because -- Well, also, with an eye on this conference. And they interestingly sectioned the exhibit off into four different areas. Under "Arcadia," they showed things like this, from the Edo period ---- a hundred ways to write "happiness" in different forms. Or they had this apple by Yoko Ono -- that, of course, later on was, you know, made into the label for The Beatles.
Under "Nirvana" they showed this Constable painting. And there was a little -- an interesting theory about abstraction. This is a blue field -- it's actually an Yves Kline painting. And the theory was that if you abstract an image, you really, you knowopen as much room for the unrepresentable -- -- and, therefore, you know, are able to involve the viewer more.
Then, under "Desire," they showed these Shunsho paintings -- -- also from the Edo period -- ink on silk.And, lastly, under "Harmony," they had this 13th-century mandala from Tibet.
Now, what I took away from the exhibit was thatmaybe with the exception of the mandala most of the pieces in there were actually about the visualization of happiness and not about happiness. And I felt a little bit cheated, because the visualization -- -- that's a really easy thing to do.And, you know, my studio -- we've done it all the time. This is, you know, a book. A happy dog -- and you take it out, it's an aggressive dog. It's a happy David Byrne and an angry David Byrne. Or a jazz poster with a happy face and a more aggressive face. You know, that's not a big deal to accomplish.
It has gotten to the point where, you know, within advertising or within the movie industry, "happy" has gotten such a bad reputation that if you actually want to do something with the subject and still appear authentic, you almost would have to, you know do it from a cynical point of view. This is, you know, the movie poster. Or we, a couple of weeks ago, designed a box set for The Talking Headswhere the happiness visualized on the cover definitely has, very much a dark side to it.
Much, much more difficult is this, where the designs actually can evoke happiness and I'm going to just show you three that actually did this for me. This is a campaign done by a young artist in New York, who calls himself True. Everybody who has ridden the New York subway system will be familiar with these signs? True printed his own version of these signs. Met every Wednesday at a subway stop with 20 of his friends. They divided up the different subway lines and added their own version.(Laughter) So this is one. (Laughter)
Now, the way this works in the system is that nobody ever looks at these signs. So you're(Laughter) you're really bored in the subway, and you kind of stare at something. And it takes you a while until it actually -- You realize that this says something different than what it normally says.(Laughter) I mean, that's, at least, how it made me happy. (Laughter)
Now, True is a real humanitarian. He didn't want any of his friends to be arrested. So he supplied everybody with this fake volunteer card. (Laughter)And also gave this fake letter from the MTA to everybody -- sort of like pretending that it's an art project financed by The Metropolitan Transit Authority. (Laughter)
Another New York project. This is at P.S. 1 -- a sculpture that's basically a square room by James Turrell, that has a retractable ceiling. Opens up at dusk and dawn every day. You don't see the horizon. You're just in there, watching the incredible, subtle changes of color in the sky. And the room is truly something to be seen. People's demeanor changes when they go in there. And, for sure, I haven't looked at the sky in the same wayafter spending an hour in there.
There are, of course, more than those three projects that I'm showing here. I would definitely say that observing Vik Muniz' "Cloud" a couple of years ago in Manhattan for sure made me happy, as well. But my last project is, again, from a young designer in New York. He's from Korea originally.And he took it upon himself to print 55,000 speech bubbles -- -- empty speech bubbles stickers, large ones and small ones. And he goes around New York and just puts them, empty as they are, on posters. (Laughter) And other people go and fill them in. (Laughter)
This one says: Please let me die in peace.(Laughter) I think that was -- The most surprising to myself was that the writing was actually so good.This is on a musician poster, that says: I am concerned that my CD will not sell more than 200,000 units. And that, as a result, my recoupable advance from my label will be taken from me. After which, my contract will be cancelled, and I'll be back doing Journey covers on Bleecker Street.(Laughter)
I think the reason this works so well is because everybody involved wins. Jee gets to have his project; the public gets a sweeter environment; and different public gets a place to express themself;and the advertisers finally get somebody to look at their ads. (Laughter)
Well, there was a question, of course, that was on my mind for a while: You know, can I do more of the things that I like doing in design and less of the ones that I don't like to be doing? Which brought me back to my list making -- -- you know, just to see what I actually like about my job.
You know, one is: just working without pressure.Then: working concentrated, without being frazzled.Or, as Nancy said before, like really immerse oneself into it. Try not to get stuck doing the same thing -- -- or try not get stuck behind the computer all day. This is, you know, related to it: getting out of the studio. Then, of course, trying to, you know, work on things where the content is actually important for me. And being able to enjoy the end results.
And then I found another list in one of my diaries that actually contained all the things that I thought I learned in my life so far. And, just about at that time, an Austrian magazine called and asked if we would want to do six spreads -- design six spreads that work like dividing pages between the different chapters in the magazine? And the whole thing just fell together. So I just picked one of the things that I thought I learned -- -- in this case, Everything I do always comes back to me -- -- and we made these spreads right out of this. So it was: Everything I doalways comes back to me.
A couple of weeks ago, a (Laughter) French company asked us to design five billboards for them. Again, we could supply the content for it. So I just picked another one. And this was two weeks ago. We flew to Arizona -- the designer who works with me, and myself -- -- and photographed this one. So it's: Trying to look good limits my life.
And then we did one more of these. This is, again, for a magazine, dividing pages. This is: Having --This is the same thing -- -- it's just, you know, photographed from the side. This is from the front.Then it's: guts Again, it's the same thing -- "guts" is just the same room, reworked. Then it's: alwaysworks out Then it's "for," with the light on (Laughter)and it's "me."
Stefan Sagmeister on what he has learned
Rockstar designer Stefan Sagmeister delivers a short, witty talk on life lessons, expressed through surprising modes of design (including ... inflatable monkeys?).
I was here about four years ago, talking about the relationship of design and happiness. At the very end of it, I showed a list under that title. I learned very few things in addition since -- (Laughter) but made a whole number of them into projects since.These are inflatable monkeys in every city in Scotland -- "Everybody always thinks they are right." They were combined in the media. "Drugs are fun in the beginning but become a drag later on." We're doing changing media. This is a projection that can see the viewer as the viewer walks by. You can't help but actually ripping that spider web apart. All of these things are pieces of graphic design. We do them for our clients. They are commissioned. I would never have the money to actually pay for the installment or pay for all the billboards or the production of these, so there's always a client attached to them. These are 65,000 coat hangers in a street that's lined with fashion stores. "Worrying solves nothing." "Money does not make me happy" appeared first as double-page spreads in a magazine. The printer lost the file, didn't tell us. When the magazine -- actually, when I got the subscription it was 12 following pages. It said, "Money does does make me happy." And a friend of mine in Austria was so, felt so sorry for methat he talked the largest casino owner in Linz into letting us wrap his building. So this is the big pedestrian zone in Linz, and it just says "Money," and if you look down the side street, it says, "does not make me happy." We had a show, just came down last week in New York. We steamed up the windows permanently, and every hour we had a different designer come in and write these things that they've learned into the steam in the window.Everybody participated -- Milton Glaser. Massimo Vignelli. Singapore was quite in discussion. This is a little spot that we filmed there that's to be displayed on the large JumboTrons in Singapore,and of course one that's dear to my heart, because all of these sentiments, some banal, some a bit more profound, all originally had come out of my diary. And I do go often into the diary and check if I wanted to change something about the situation. If it's -- see it for a long enough time, I actually do something about it. And the very last one is a billboard. This is our roof in New York, the roof of the studio. This is newsprint plus stencils that lie on the newsprint. We let that lie around in the sun. As you all know, newsprint yellows significantly in the sun. After a week, we took the stencils and the leaves off, shipped the newsprints to Lisbon to a very sunny spot, so on day one the billboard said,"Complaining is silly. Either act or forget." Three days later it faded, and a week later, no more complaining anywhere. (Laughter) Thank you so much. (Applause)
Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off
Every seven years, designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook. He explains the often overlooked value of time off and shows the innovative projects inspired by his time in Bali.
I run a design studio in New York. Every seven years I close it for one year to pursue some little experiments, things that are always difficult to accomplish during the regular working year. In that year we are not available for any of our clients. We are totally closed. And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time.
I originally had opened the studio in New York to combine my two loves, music and design. And we created videos and packaging for many musicians that you know. And for even more that you've never heard of. As I realized, just like with many many things in my life that I actually love, I adapt to it. And I get, over time, bored by them. And for sure, in our case, our work started to look the same. You see here a glass eye in a die cut of a book. Quite the similar idea, then, a perfume packaged in a book, in a die cut. So I decided to close it down for one year.
Also is the knowledge that right now we spend about in the first 25 years of our lives learning.Then there is another 40 years that's really reserved for working. And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement. And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years. (Applause) That's clearly enjoyable for myself. But probably even more important is that the work that comes out of these years flows back into the company, and into society at large, rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two.
There is a fellow TEDster who spoke two years ago, Jonathan Haidt, who defined his work into three different levels. And they rang very true for me. I can see my work as a job. I do it for money. I likely already look forward to the weekend, on Thursdays. And I probably will need a hobby as a leveling mechanism. In a career I'm definitely more engaged. But at the same time there will be periods when I think is all that really hard work really worth my while? While in the third one, in the calling, very much likely I would do it also if I wouldn't be financially compensated for it.
I am not a religious person myself, but I did look for nature. I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City. Looked for something different for the second one. Europe and the U.S. didn't really feel enticingbecause I knew them too well. So Asia it was. The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali. Sri Lanka still had the civil war going on. So Bali it was. It's a wonderful, very craft-oriented society.
I arrived there in September 2008, and pretty much started to work right away. There is wonderful inspiration coming from the area itself. However the first thing that I needed was mosquito repellent typography because they were definitely around heavily. And then I needed some sort of way to be able to get back to all the wild dogs that surround my house, and attacked me during my morning walks. So we created this series of 99 portraits on tee shirts. Every single dog on one tee shirt. As a little retaliation with a just ever so slightly menacing message (Laughter) on the back of the shirt.(Laughter)
Just before I left New York I decided I could actually renovate my studio. And then just leave it all to them. And I don't have to do anything. So I looked for furniture. And it turned out that all the furniture that I really liked, I couldn't afford. And all the stuff I could afford, I didn't like. So one of the things that we pursued in Bali was pieces of furniture. This one, of course, still works with the wild dogs. It's not quite finished yet. And I think by the time this lamp came about, (Laughter) I had finally made piece with those dogs. (Laughter)
Then there is a coffee table. I also did a coffee table. It's called Be Here Now. It includes 330 compasses. And we had custom espresso cups made that hide a magnet inside, and make those compasses go crazy, always centering on them.Then this is a fairly talkative, verbose kind of chair. I also start meditating for the first time in my life in Bali. And at the same time, I'm extremely awarehow boring it is to hear about other people's happinesses. So I will not really go too far into it.
Many of you will know this TEDster, Danny Gilbert, whose book, actually I got it through the TED book club. I think it took me four years to finally read it, while on sabbatical. And I was pleased to see that he actually wrote the book while he was on sabbatical. And I'll show you a couple of peoplethat did well by pursuing sabbaticals.
This is Ferran Adria. Many people think he is right now the best chef in the world with his restaurant north of Barcelona, elBulli. His restaurant is open seven months every year. He closes it down for five months to experiment with a full kitchen staff. His latest numbers are fairly impressive. He can seat, throughout the year, he can seat 8,000 people. And he has 2.2 million requests for reservations.
If I look at my cycle, seven years, one year sabbatical, it's 12.5 percent of my time. And if I look at companies that are actually more successful than mine, 3M, since the 1930s is giving all their engineers 15 percent to pursue whatever they want. There is some good successes. Scotch tape came out of this program, as well as Art Fry developed sticky notes from during his personal time for 3M. Google, of course, very famously gives 20 percent for their software engineers to pursue their own personal projects.
Anybody in here has actually ever conducted a sabbatical? That's about five percent of everybody.So I'm not sure if you saw your neighbor putting their hand up. Talk to them about if it was successful or not. I've found that finding out about what I'm going to like in the future, my very best way is to talk to people who have actually done it much better than myself envisioning it.
When I had the idea of doing one, the process was I made the decision and I put it into my daily planner book. And then I told as many, many people as I possibly could about it so that there was no way that I could chicken out later on. (Laughter)
In the beginning, on the first sabbatical, it was rather disastrous. I had thought that I should do this without any plan, that this vacuum of time somehow would be wonderful and enticing for idea generation. It was not. I just, without a plan, I just reacted to little requests, not work requests, those I all said no to, but other little requests. Sending mail to Japanese design magazines and things like that.So I became my own intern. (Laughter)
And I very quickly made a list of the things I was interested in, put them in a hierarchy, divided them into chunks of time and then made a plan, very much like in grade school. What does it say here? Monday eight to nine: story writing. Nine to ten: future thinking. Was not very successful. And so on and so forth. And that actually, specifically as a starting point of the first sabbatical, worked really well for me. What came out of it? I really got close to design again. I had fun. Financially, seen over the long term, it was actually successful. Because of the improved quality, we could ask for higher prices.
And probably most importantly, basically everything we've done in the seven years following the first sabbatical came out of thinking of that one single year. And I'll show you a couple of projects that came out of the seven years following that sabbatical. One of the strands of thinking I was involved in was that sameness is so incredibly overrated. This whole idea that everything needs to be exactly the same works for a very very few strand of companies, and not for everybody else.
We were asked to design an identity for Casa de Musica, the Rem Koolhaas-built music center in Porto, in Portugal. And even though I desired to do an identity that doesn't use the architecture, I failed at that. And mostly also because I realized out of a Rem Koolhaas presentation to the city of Porto where he talked about a conglomeration of various layers of meaning. Which I understood after Itranslated it from architecture speech in to regular English, basically as logo making. And I understood that the building itself was a logo.
So then it became quite easy. We put a mask on it,looked at it deep down in the ground, checked it out from all sides, west, north, south, east, top and bottom. Colored them in a very particular way by having a friend of mine write a piece of software,the Casa de Musica Logo Generator. That's connected to a scanner. You put any image in there, like that Beethoven image. And the software, in a second, will give you the Casa de Musica Beethoven logo. Which, when you actually have to design a Beethoven poster, comes in handy because the visual information of the logo and the actual poster, is exactly the same.
So it will always fits together, conceptually, of course. If Zappa's music is performed, it gets its own logo. Or Philip Glass or Lou Reed or the Chemical Brothers who all performed there, get their own Casa de Musica logo. It works the same internally with the president or the musical director,whose Casa de Musica portraits wind up on their business cards. There is a full-blown orchestraliving inside the building. It has a more transparent identity. The truck they go on tour with. Or there's a smaller contemporary orchestra, 12 people that remixes its own title.
And one of the handy things that came about was that you could take the logo type and create advertising out of it. Like this Donna Toney poster,or Chopin, or Mozart, or La Monte Young. You can take the shape and make typography out of it. You can grow it underneath the skin. You can have a poster for a family event in front of the house, or a rave underneath the house, or a weekly programas well as educational services.
Second insight. So far, until that point I had been mostly involved or used the language of design for promotional purposes, which was fine with me. On one hand I have nothing against selling. My parents are both sales people. But I did feel that I spent so much time learning this language, why do I only promote with it? There must be something else. And the whole series of work came out of it.Some of you might have seen it. I showed some of it at earlier TEDs before, under the title "Things I've Learned In My Life So Far". I'll just show two now.
This is a whole wall of bananas at different ripenesses on the opening day in this gallery in New York. It says, "Self confidence produces fine results." This is after a week. After two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks. And you see the self confidence almost comes back, but not quite.These are some pictures visitors sent to me.(Laughter)
And then the city of Amsterdam gave us a plaza and asked us to do something. We used the stone plates as a grid for our little piece. We got 250 thousand coins from the central bank, at different darknesses. So we got brand new ones, shiny ones, medium ones, and very old, dark ones. And with the help of 100 volunteers, over a week,created this fairly floral typography that spelled, "Obsessions make my life worse and my work better."
And the idea of course was to make the type so precious that as an audience you would be in between, "Should I really take as much money as I can? Or should I leave the piece intact as it is right now?" While we built all this up during that week, with the hundred volunteers, a good number of the neighbors surrounding the plaza got very close to it and quite loved it. So when it was finally done, and in the first night a guy came with big plastic bagsand scooped up as many coins as he could possibly carry, one of the neighbors called the police.
And the Amsterdam police in all their wisdom,came, saw, and they wanted to protect the artwork.And they swept it all up and put it into custody at police headquarters. (Laughter) I think you see, you see them sweeping. You see them sweeping right here. That's the police, getting rid of it all. So after eight hours that's pretty much all that was left of the whole thing. (Laughter)
We are also working on the start of a bigger project in Bali. It's a movie about happiness. And here we asked some nearby pigs to do the titles for us. They weren't quite slick enough. So we asked the goose to do it again, and hoped she would do somehow,a more elegant or pretty job. And I think she overdid it. Just a bit too ornamental. And my studio is very close to the monkey forest. And the monkeys in that monkey forest looked, actually, fairly happy. So we asked those guys to do it again. They did a fine job, but had a couple of readability problems. So of course whatever you don't really do yourselfdoesn't really get done properly.
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