legends of design

Amazing Work of Stefan Sagmeister

guest — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:58:33 +0000

Stefan Sagmeister is a Austrian designer working in New York City whose work gets attention worldwide. He's done projects for so famous clients like, e.g. Adobe, the Rolling Stones, Talking Heads, Aerosmith etc. Sagmeister got awarded with the Lucky Strike Award 2009 which is endowed with 50.000$. Moreover, he got nominated for the Grammy because of his awesome CD cover designs four times and got awarded once, for the cover of the Talking Heads album "Once In A Lifetime" in 2005. Since 1993 Sagmeister runs a small design studio in New York City.

What inspires you at the moments of creation?

One of my most frequent sources of inspiration is a newly occupied hotel room. I find it easy to work far away from the studio, where thoughts about the implementation of an idea don't come to mind immediately but I can dream a bit more freely

"Our own tongues weren't long enough. So (photographer) Tom Schierlitz went to the meat market and came back with cow's tongues. They looked great."

How do you define 'creativity'?

To create with open perception.

How do you see design for business purposes? In the enthusiasm of selling, is it possible to say that the end justifies the means?

I think we are responsible for anything we do, walking down the street, climbing a mountain and selling a product. We can do all three in a wonderful, sweet and elegant fashion, or we can fuck it up. It’s all up to us.

For whom would you like to design?

Coca Cola and King Crimson.

This work is created out of 2500 paper coffee cups and symbolizes the pure caffeine design students are often running on.

How do you know when to say no to a potential client?

When the product is bad. When I don't like them. When they have rush jobs (clients who are bad at scheduling a job are often bad in other areas too).

What aspects of CD packaging drew you to doing CD packaging design for the music industry, and why do you feel you've been so successful at it?

Music is my other big interest in life. Its more interesting to go to meetings with Lou Reed and David Byrne than spending my time with marketing managers. CD covers normally don't get thrown away. Many CD's are distributed internationally and printed in large quantities. I am very tall, so I love working on something very small.

Sagmeister won the Grammy for designing this CD box of the Talking Heads.

Why did David Byrne, the Rolling Stones and Lou Reed come to you to design their CDs?

Free lemon wafers.

What would make you NOT do a CD for a band that asked?

1. Bad music. There is an old (but nevertheless true) adage that your cover is only as good as the music it packages.
2. The need for a big breasted female astronaut having to play a major role on the cover (=actual request)
3. Nasty people"

TED talks

Stefan Sagmeister shares happy design

Stefan Sagmeister on what he has learned

For more information visit:

http://www.sagmeister.com
http://twitter.com/sagmeisterinc

Update: Stefan Sagmeister has just won his second Grammy for the best box design on Monday.

About the Author

I'm LuKas Salomon a young Austrian design interested guy who is pretty new in the online design scene. I write on several design focussed blogs and gonna launch an own blog soon.

Design Legends #2: Joshua Davis

abduzeedo — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:04:20 +0000

Following our series of Design Legends, our next featured artist is the great Joshua Davis. It's impossible to talk about modern graphic design using computers without mentioning his name and everything he has done creating scripts and apps to generate patterns and elements that became Joshua's superb work.

A proficient illustrator and painter with a passion for technology, Davis’ work brought an entirely new dimension to art. Utilizing randomization in controlled environments, or Chaos Theory, Davis established a new and unique perspective on visual communication and creative expression, pioneering an area previously unexplored in graphic design.

In January 2001, as part of issue #100 of K10k.net, Davis posted an autobiography — a revealing look on his personal life in the New York City art/club scene in the early 1990s, his drug addiction, and his ability to overcome it to pursue his goal of being a full-time artist. Davis wrote that once he left the club scene, he aspired to be a writer and illustrator of children's books. It was at the Pratt Institute that Davis began to delve into writing HTML, working under Thomas Noller in 1995. Soon after, he began to experiment with Macromedia Flash and its early scripting language, and further with ActionScript programming.

Joshua Davis' work became a major influence in graphic and web design in the "Y2K" era of the Internet’s dot-com explosion. Davis himself was distinguished from other web designers by his many tattoos, leading to his reputation as being a web design "rockstar" — a label he dismisses. From 1998 to 2001, he worked with the web production company Kioken. When Kioken folded, Davis became an independent web designer and artist, touring the world to speak at various graphic design conferences, such as SIGGRAPH, Flash Forward, BD4D, OFFF, Graphika Manila and others.

In 2003, he was asked by Tool's Adam Jones to take over their websites. The band's official site was replaced by an intro page designed by Davis, but has been changed.

In 2002 he teamed up with developer Branden Hall to form The Department of Notation Studios, a media development studio. The company was disbanded in 2006 when Hall left to form Automata Studios Ltd. with fellow developer Keenan Keeling. Despite the separation Davis and Hall continue to collaborate on various projects.

As of 2007, Davis lives in New York with his wife and daughter. He is a professor at New York’s School of Visual Arts, runs his own design studio, and continues to lecture and lead workshops in design conferences. Wikipedia

Joshua Davis' work has influenced a lot of great digital artists such as Guilherme Marconi, James White and many others. He is a name that is always remembered when we interview new designers and this article is just to show you a little bit of his work.

For more information visit Joshua's website at http://www.joshuadavis.com/

Videos

Images

iPhone App

Reflect by Joshua Davis from Erik Attkisson on Vimeo.

About the author

Abduzeedo is a blog about design. There are all sorts of articles for those who want to look for inspiration. Also you will find very useful tutorials for the most used applications out there, with a special selection of Photoshop Tutorials and Illustrator Tutorials. You can get in follow us via Twitter at @abduzeedo

Design Legends #1 - David Carson and Book Giveaway

abduzeedo — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:30:28 +0000

We love featuring great designers and digital artists here on Abduzeedo. It's really good to see the creations of young and talented people from all over the world. However, we realized that we needed to take some time to post about the legends. There is no question, we've all had some inspiration from the masters of photography and Photoshop. This post is about one such legend, at least for me. His name is David Carson.

Everyone has probably heard of or read about David. If not, please do so right now because Carson has been one of the greatest influences on modern graphic design in the last 25 years. His inventive, and sometimes crazy methods of distorting and playing with typography have really influenced a lot of designers. Also, he came under a lot of criticism because of his experimentation.

David Carson became renowned for his inventive graphics in the 1990s. Having worked as a sociology teacher and professional surfer in the late 1970s, he art directed various music, skateboarding and surfing magazines through the 1980s. As art director of surfing and style magazine Ray Gun (1992-5), Carson came to worldwide attention. His layouts featured distortions or mixes of 'vernacular' typefaces and fractured imagery, rendering them almost illegible. Indeed, his maxim of the 'end of print' questioned the role of type in the emergent age of digital design, following on from California New Wave and coinciding with experiments at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. In the later 1990s he shifted from 'surf subculture' to corporate work for Nike, Levis, and Citibank.

Carson's work is familiar among the generation that grew up with Raygun Magazine and its progeny such as huH and xceler8, and in general, the visually savvy MTV generation, but his work still receives criticism from a generation that refuses to engage with his connotative excesses. Carson has been one of the greatest influences on modern graphic design in the last twenty five years. He took photography and type and manipulated and twisted them together and on some level confusing the message but in reality he was drawing the eyes of the viewer deeper within the composition.

We highly recommend that you visit his website or simply Google his name. You will be amazed. Also, his book "The End of Print", is a must have for your design library. For more information visit the links below:

UPDATE: We will give away one copy of The end of print book. Just leave a comment and we will announce the winner next week. Remember, you will have to be an Abduzeedo member to participate.

legends of design

Amazing Work of Stefan Sagmeister

What inspires you at the moments of creation?

How do you define 'creativity'?

How do you see design for business purposes? In the enthusiasm of selling, is it possible to say that the end justifies the means?

For whom would you like to design?

How do you know when to say no to a potential client?

What aspects of CD packaging drew you to doing CD packaging design for the music industry, and why do you feel you've been so successful at it?

Why did David Byrne, the Rolling Stones and Lou Reed come to you to design their CDs?

What would make you NOT do a CD for a band that asked?

TED talks

Stefan Sagmeister shares happy design

Stefan Sagmeister on what he has learned

About the Author

Design Legends #2: Joshua Davis

Videos

Images

iPhone App

About the author

Sponsored Links:

Design Legends #1 - David Carson and Book Giveaway

UPDATE: We will give away one copy of The end of print book. Just leave a comment and we will announce the winner next week. Remember, you will have to be an Abduzeedo member to participate.

Videos

Images

About the author

Sponsored Links: